The Trump Alarm

Republicans mobilize in an attempt to stop the business magnate, but it may be too late.

At long last it seems the alarm bells have truly started to ring. The Republican Party leadership is terrified of the possibility of multimillionaire Donald Trump winning the nomination as candidate for the White House. Conventional wisdom – that the early front runners lose some steam as the primaries play out – is clashing with the cold, hard reality of the situation: There is no let-up in the attraction that a large part of the Republican electorate feels toward Trump.

For the Republican establishment, the situation takes on an even more nightmarish air when you consider that, as shown on Super Tuesday and in Saturday’s primaries, the alternative to the populist showman Trump is the intransigent, evangelical Ted Cruz. Prospects appear bleak for the two relatively moderate candidates who remain in the race and the fact that Cruz is cementing himself as the second choice of many voters is shattering hopes that a more realistic option will prevail.

The more urgent problem, however, is Trump. The fact that he has now crossed dozens of red lines hasn’t stopped him from continuing to make a show out of his demeanor. During Thursday’s debate in Detroit he boasted about the size of his genitals, but the crude nature of Trump’s performances is perhaps the least of the Republican establishment’s problems. The true danger comes by way of his other statements – defending the use of torture methods involving suffocation and assuring that, if he were president, the military would obey his orders to employ the practice known as waterboarding.

Although it is late in the game, heavyweight voices shocked by the turmoil caused by Trump, like that of ex-CIA director Michael Hayden, who recently expressed his “fear” and “concern” to this paper, are now making themselves heard. The last two Republican presidential candidates, John McCain and Mitt Romney, have also entered into the fray. Internationally, German Chancellor Angela Merkel has swooned with praise for Hilary Clinton while Vice-Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel has unceremoniously labeled Trump “a threat to peace and social cohesion.”

The Republican Party machine has started to mobilize resources to do what has up until now been impossible – to expose the other side of Trump, the reverse side of the flawless image of a successful businessman – of a man who denounces a system that he himself forms a part of and who uses the means of power to benefit his own businesses. Of a man who declares war on immigrants but who has employed the very same illegal immigrants he claims he wants to deport, and who has in his closet the skeleton of Trump University – a completely unlicensed online education center that handed out completely worthless degrees.

It is possible that these respectable voices and the attempts to portray another side of Trump will have an effect. However, the wave of support that Trump enjoys, in large part the same wave that propels Bernie Sanders over Hillary Clinton, is not going to disappear overnight. This is a wave that capitalizes on real anger from those excluded from the economic recovery and who are scared of globalization, a group that suffers from inequality and who are fed up with the politics of Washington. This is the fuel that alongside the governability crisis and in just the right circumstances, fuels populist flames the world over.