What If Donald Trump Were the Republican Candidate for the White House?

The success of the New York billionaire, who has topped the polls for more than 100 days in the race for the Republican nomination, is causing panic among the party elite who are preparing their riposte. Trump was sometimes called a clown but is now taken very seriously.

So, what if he does win the Republican nomination, or even the presidency of the United States? He was called a clown and a buffoon of reality TV, but Donald Trump no longer amuses the Republican Party elite. He has topped all the polls for more than 100 days, with the exception of Thursday’s Iowa poll by the Quinnipiac Institute which put his rival Ben Carson at 28 percent, ahead of the New York billionaire’s 20 percent. With three months to go until the start of the primaries, the establishment is panic struck. The Republican strategist Alex Castellanos was one of those who did not for an instant believe in the robustness of the New York demagogue’s candidacy. Today he admits that “unhappily, I’ve changed my mind.” Donald Trump is no longer associated with Herman Cain or Michele Bachmann who, in 2011, had their hour of glory in the pre-primaries before their support collapsed.

Republican voters are in a fiercely anti-political mood. People are looking for candidates not only to give voice to their anger but to amplify it.

Attack Ads

We only have to cite David Leonhardt, managing editor of the New York Times’ website “The Upshot” to illustrate how surprising Donald Trump’s success is. In response to a reader, he recently wrote that it was “highly unlikely” that the billionaire New Yorker would gain the nomination, because that would “violate just about every historical pattern of presidential races.” There is still a long way to go before the Republican convention next July in Cleveland, when the Republican candidate for the White House will be crowned. But it has to be said that the establishment that produces candidates like Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, John Kasich or even Chris Christie is in trouble. It does not know how to stop the race for victory of a candidate who claims to be a businessman, but certainly not a politician.

A political action committee, or super PAC, called the Club for Growth has already started an anti-Trump campaign. In September it funded attack ads against Trump to the tune of a million dollars which were broadcast in Iowa. It promises that its efforts to put a spoke in Donald Trump’s wheels will intensify in other states. But none of the measures taken so far have worked. It is not certain that such adverts will achieve their objective. Recently the main donors to the Republican Party met in the Mayflower Hotel in Washington. Their message was clear: He must be stopped, otherwise “he will destroy the Party.” The abrasive commentator of a conservative radio station, the ebullient Rush Limbaugh cannot believe it: “When is the last time you remember a political party working so hard to bring down its own front-runner? I’ve never seen anything like this before.”

However, several commentators have already promised that Donald Trump would fall following his incendiary remarks on Mexican immigrants as “criminals and rapists.” Nothing happened. The Republican candidate even dared to question the standing of the Vietnam War hero John McCain, noting that he wasn’t really a hero given that he was captured. Trump was judged to have “crossed a red line,” but the episode did not affect him. On the contrary, it reinforced his status as a demagogue who takes malicious delight in breaking taboos.

The Antithesis of a Traditional Politician

Many people are asking how such a phenomenon is possible. Donald Trump has very limited knowledge of foreign affairs and is just as ill-informed about domestic politics. His speeches are not about substance, which he avoids like the plague. They are about style. The New Yorker presents himself as the antithesis of politics corrupted by lobbyists and the self-serving nature of Washington. His speeches resonate with an electorate who sees the federal government, the state, as the enemy to conquer.

Pete Wehner, the American conservative commentator, highlights this in an opinion piece: “Republican voters are in a fiercely anti-political mood. As a result, the usual ways voters judge a candidate — experience, governing achievements, mastery of issues — have been devalued. People are looking for candidates not only to give voice to their anger but to amplify it.”

But will the deliberate use of outrageous statements enable Donald Trump to maintain such omnipresence in the media? In an interview last week he had the temerity to declare that George W. Bush did not ensure the security of the country because he was in the White House when the 9/11 attacks took place. His statement created a storm in the Grand Old Party, outraged that he had broken a taboo and Jeb Bush, the struggling establishment candidate, fell into the trap. He stuck his head above the parapet to defend his brother, but in doing so, he linked his destiny to the man who had waged a disastrous war in Iraq.