Just weeks before the Iowa caucuses Donald Trump was subjected to a barrage of criticism from Republican commentators. New York Times house conservative David Brooks, who has threatened to move to Canada if Trump becomes president, called Trump a “solipsistic branding genius whose ‘policies’ have no contact with Planet Earth.” The National Review devoted a whole issue to parsing Trump’s manifold flaws and dangers to the Republican Party and the country: “Trump is a philosophically unmoored political opportunist who would trash the broad conservative ideological consensus within the GOP in favor of a free-floating populism with strong-man overtones.”
And those were the nicer comments.
This battle between Trump and the Republican establishment raises interesting questions about where we are politically after the disastrous seven years of Barack Obama’s presidency. Start with the contested notion that there even exists something we can call the Republican establishment. Trump along with Ted Cruz have presented themselves as anti-establishment candidates, “outsiders” battling the inside-the-Beltway “cartel,” to use Cruz’s word. As such they appeal to those voters who long have despised Congress and its pundit enablers for “going along to get along” rather than taking legislative action to slow down Obama’s ongoing fundamental transformation of America into an EU social-democratic nanny-state populated by the spawn of Julia and Pajama Boy.
Critics of this formulation argue that there is no “establishment,” that the diverse and conflicting opinions among Republican leaders, and the failure of this establishment to use its imagined powers and slow down Donald Trump, is proof that it is a figment of a paranoiac imagination. Didn’t the Chairman of the Republican National Committee punish National Review for dissing Trump by disinviting it from cosponsoring the next debate? And didn’t establishment stalwart Bob Dole say nice things about Trump during his evisceration of Ted Cruz? There is no unified cabal of Republican bigwigs colluding with the enemy and betraying the ordinary voters who put them in office.