Inside the Republican Party’s Desperate Mission to Stop Donald Trump
By ALEXANDER BURNS, MAGGIE HABERMAN and JONATHAN MARTIN
FEBRUARY 27, 2016
The scenario Karl Rove outlined was bleak.

Addressing a luncheon of Republican governors and donors in Washington on Feb. 19, he warned that Donald J. Trump’s increasingly likely nomination would be catastrophic, dooming the party in November. But Mr. Rove, the master strategist of George W. Bush’s campaigns, insisted it was not too late for them to stop Mr. Trump, according to three people present.

At a meeting of Republican governors the next morning, Paul R. LePage of Maine called for action. Seated at a long boardroom table at the Willard Hotel, he erupted in frustration over the state of the 2016 race, saying Mr. Trump’s nomination would deeply wound the Republican Party. Mr. LePage urged the governors to draft an open letter “to the people,” disavowing Mr. Trump and his divisive brand of politics.

The suggestion was not taken up. Since then, Mr. Trump has only gotten stronger, winning two more state contests and collecting the endorsement of Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey.

In public, there were calls for the party to unite behind a single candidate. In dozens of interviews, elected officials, political strategists and donors described a frantic, last-ditch campaign to block Mr. Trump — and the agonizing reasons that many of them have become convinced it will fail. Behind the scenes, a desperate mission to save the party sputtered and stalled at every turn.

Efforts to unite warring candidates behind one failed spectacularly: An overture from Senator Marco Rubio to Mr. Christie angered and insulted the governor. An unsubtle appeal from Mitt Romney to John Kasich, about the party’s need to consolidate behind one rival to Mr. Trump, fell on deaf ears. At least two campaigns have drafted plans to overtake Mr. Trump in a brokered convention, and the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, has laid out a plan that would have lawmakers break with Mr. Trump explicitly in a general election.

Despite all the forces arrayed against Mr. Trump, the interviews show, the party has been gripped by a nearly incapacitating leadership vacuum and a paralytic sense of indecision and despair, as he has won smashing victories in South Carolina and Nevada. Donors have dreaded the consequences of clashing with Mr. Trump directly. Elected officials have balked at attacking him out of concern that they might unintentionally fuel his populist revolt. And Republicans have lacked someone from outside the presidential race who could help set the terms of debate from afar.

The endorsement by Mr. Christie, a not unblemished but still highly regarded figure within the party’s elite — he is a former chairman of the Republican Governors Association — landed Friday with crippling force. It was by far the most important defection to Mr. Trump’s insurgency: Mr. Christie may give cover to other Republicans tempted to join Mr. Trump rather than trying to beat him. Not just the Stop Trump forces seemed in peril, but also the traditional party establishment itself.

Former Gov. Michael O. Leavitt of Utah, a top adviser to Mr. Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign, said the party was unable to come up with a united front to quash Mr. Trump’s campaign.

“There is no mechanism,” Mr. Leavitt said. “There is no smoke-filled room. If there is, I’ve never seen it, nor do I know anyone who has. This is going to play out in the way that it will.”

Republicans have ruefully acknowledged that they came to this dire pass in no small part because of their own passivity. There were ample opportunities to battle Mr. Trump earlier; more than one plan was drawn up only to be rejected. Rivals who attacked him early, like Rick Perry and Bobby Jindal, the former governors of Texas and Louisiana, received little backup and quickly faded.

Late last fall, the strategists Alex Castellanos and Gail Gitcho, both presidential campaign veterans, reached out to dozens of the party’s leading donors, including the casino magnate Sheldon Adelson and the hedge-fund manager Paul Singer, with a plan to create a “super PAC” that would take down Mr. Trump. In a confidential memo, the strategists laid out the mission of a group they called “ProtectUS.”

“We want voters to imagine Donald Trump in the Big Chair in the Oval Office, with responsibilities for worldwide confrontation at his fingertips,” they wrote in the previously unreported memo. Mr. Castellanos even produced ads portraying Mr. Trump as unfit for the Oval Office, according to people who saw them and who, along with many of those interviewed, insisted on anonymity to discuss private conversations.

The two strategists, who declined to comment, proposed to attack Mr. Trump in New Hampshire over his business failures and past liberal positions, and emphasized the extreme urgency of their project. A Trump nomination would not only cause Republicans to lose the presidency, they wrote, “but we also lose the Senate, competitive gubernatorial elections and moderate House Republicans.”

No major donors committed to the project, and it was abandoned. No other sustained Stop Trump effort sprang up in its place.

Resistance to Mr. Trump still runs deep. The party’s biggest benefactors remain totally opposed to him. At a recent presentation hosted by the billionaires Charles G. and David H. Koch, the country’s most prolific conservative donors, their political advisers characterized Mr. Trump’s record as utterly unacceptable, and highlighted his support for government-funded business subsidies and government-backed health care, according to people who attended.

But the Kochs, like Mr. Adelson, have shown no appetite to intervene directly in the primary with decisive force.

The American Future Fund, a conservative group that does not disclose its donors, announced plans on Friday to run ads blasting Mr. Trump for his role in an educational company that is alleged to have defrauded students. But there is only limited time for the commercials to sink in before some of the country’s biggest states award their delegates in early March.

Instead, Mr. Trump’s challengers are staking their hopes on a set of guerrilla tactics and long-shot possibilities, racing to line up mainstream voters and interest groups against his increasingly formidable campaign. Donors and elected leaders have begun to rouse themselves for the fight, but perhaps too late.

Two of Mr. Trump’s opponents have openly acknowledged that they may have to wrest the Republican nomination from him in a deadlocked convention.

Speaking to political donors in Manhattan on Wednesday evening, Mr. Rubio’s campaign manager, Terry Sullivan, noted that most delegates are bound to a candidate only on the first ballot. Many of them, moreover, are likely to be party regulars who may not support Mr. Trump over multiple rounds of balloting, he added, according to a person present for Mr. Sullivan’s presentation, which was first reported by CNN.

Several senior Republicans, including Mr. Romney, have made direct appeals to Mr. Kasich to gauge his willingness to stand down and allow the party to unify behind another candidate. But Mr. Kasich has told at least one person that his plan is to win the Ohio primary on March 15 and gather the party behind his campaign if Mr. Rubio loses in Florida, his home state, on the same day.

In Washington, Mr. Kasich’s persistence in the race has become a source of frustration. At Senate luncheons on Wednesday and Thursday, Republican lawmakers vented about Mr. Kasich’s intransigence, calling it selfishness.

One senior Republican senator, noting that Mr. Kasich has truly contested only one of the first four states, complained: “He’s just flailing his arms around and having a wonderful time going around the country, and it just drives me up the wall.”

Mr. McConnell was especially vocal, describing Mr. Kasich’s persistence as irrational because he has no plausible path to the nomination, several senators said.

While still hopeful that Mr. Rubio might prevail, Mr. McConnell has begun preparing senators for the prospect of a Trump nomination, assuring them that, if it threatened to harm them in the general election, they could run negative ads about Mr. Trump to create space between him and Republican senators seeking re-election. Mr. McConnell has raised the possibility of treating Mr. Trump’s loss as a given and describing a Republican Senate to voters as a necessary check on a President Hillary Clinton, according to senators at the lunches.

He has reminded colleagues of his own 1996 re-election campaign, when he won comfortably amid President Bill Clinton’s easy re-election. Of Mr. Trump, Mr. McConnell has said, “We’ll drop him like a hot rock,” according to his colleagues.

Mr. Rubio showed a lack of finesse in dealing with his fallen rivals’ injured egos.

Mr. Christie had attacked Mr. Rubio contemptuously in New Hampshire, calling him shallow and scripted, and humiliating him in a debate. Nevertheless, Mr. Rubio made a tentative overture to Mr. Christie after his withdrawal from the presidential race. He left the governor a voice mail message, assuring Mr. Christie that he had a bright future in public service, according to people who have heard Mr. Christie’s characterization of the message.

Mr. Christie, 53, took the message as deeply disrespectful and patronizing, questioning why “a 44-year-old” was telling him about his future, said people who described his reaction on the condition of anonymity. Further efforts to connect the two never yielded a direct conversation.

Mr. Trump, by contrast, made frequent calls to Mr. Christie once he dropped out, a person close to the governor said. After the two met at Trump Tower on Thursday with their wives, Mr. Christie flew to Texas and emerged on Friday to back Mr. Trump and mock Mr. Rubio as a desperate candidate near the end of a losing campaign.

Efforts to reconcile Mr. Rubio and Mr. Bush, a former governor of Florida, have been scarcely more successful, dating to before the South Carolina primary, when Mr. Rove reached out to their aides to broker a cease-fire, according to Republicans familiar briefed on the conversations. It did not last.

Mr. Bush has been nearly silent since quitting the race Feb. 20, playing golf with his son Jeb Jr. in Miami and turning to the task of thank-you notes. In a Wednesday conference call with supporters, he did not express a preference among the remaining contenders. When Mr. Rubio called him, their conversation did not last long, two people briefed on it said, and Mr. Rubio did not ask for his endorsement.

“There’s this desire, verging on panic, to consolidate the field,” said Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina,  a former supporter of Mr. Bush. “But I don’t see any movement at all.”

Mr. Romney had been eager to tilt the race, and even called Mr. Christie after he ended his campaign to vent about Mr. Trump and suggest that Mr. Christie help consolidate the field. On the night of the primary, Mr. Romney was close to endorsing Mr. Rubio himself, people familiar with his deliberations said.

Yet Mr. Romney pulled back, instead telling advisers that he would take on Mr. Trump directly.

After a Tuesday night dinner with former campaign aides, during which he expressed a sense of horror at the Republican race, Mr. Romney made a blunt demand Wednesday on Fox News: Mr. Trump must release his tax returns to prove he was not concealing a “bombshell” political vulnerability.

Mr. Trump responded only with casual derision, dismissing Mr. Romney on Twitter as “one of the dumbest and worst candidates in the history of Republican politics.”

Mr. Romney is expected to withhold his support before the voting this week on the so-called Super Tuesday, but some of his allies have urged him to endorse Mr. Rubio before Michigan and Idaho vote March 8. Mr. Romney grew up in Michigan, and many Idahoans are fellow Mormons.

But already, a handful of senior party leaders have struck a conciliatory tone toward Mr. Trump. Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the House majority leader, said on television that he believed he could work with him as president. Many in the party acknowledged a growing mood of resignation.

Fred Malek, the finance chairman of the Republican Governors Association, said the party’s mainstream had simply run up against the limits of its influence.

“There’s no single leader and no single institution that can bring a diverse group called the Republican Party together, behind a single candidate,” Mr. Malek said. “It just doesn’t exist.”

On Friday, a few hours after Mr. Christie endorsed him, Mr. Trump collected support from a second governor, who in a radio interview said Mr. Trump could be “one of the greatest presidents.”

That governor was Paul LePage.

It appears to be the case that the candidate everyone loves to hate, Donald Trump, will be accruing enough delegates ahead of the Republican Convention to successfully threaten that party’s nomination for president. Just a few months ago, most serious political analysts wrote off the Trump campaign as absurdly rediculous to a degree that he was expected to fail miserably the moment people started casting votes in the states’ primaries. Obviously the hypothesis has been disproven.

I don’t personally support Mr. Trump’s campaign, and I don’t see myself voting for him unless the virtues of libertarianism spontaneously overcome him like Paul being reborn through his vision of Christ. But the reason for his campaign’s success so far is a matter of pretty intense discussion, as is wont to happen when the learned are publically proven wrong, so I am interested in weighing in with my opinion on the matter.

First point: the field of candidates for the Republican nomination is extraordinarily large. And even though it is rapidly shrinking, the consequence in votes from Iowa to Nevada has thus far been a significantly divided return. That’s not unusual in places that commonly have multi-party elections, but so much of the expectation in America has to do with the stranglehold the major parties have on government that conceptualising the outcome of a 9-candidate race is nowhere near as intuitive as guessing between just two guys (or gals, these days). Trump hasn’t actually won a majority of Republican votes in any of the primaries so far, just the most of them, except in Iowa. For those of us with remedial math issues, that means that he has not been the first choice candidate for most of the Republicans who have voted so far. It remains to be seen how many would choose him as their second… or any… choice. But right now, that matters very little because most state primaries are “winner takes all” and not “proportional” when it comes to allocating delegates for the nominating convention.

Second point: the strategy Trump’s campaign has emoloyed of pointing The Donald like a wrecking ball at everything from national immigration policies to international trade negotiations has served a directed purpose that is becoming more discernable as the primary season continues. Donald Trump, however much I dislike what he is advocating, is no fool when it comes to numbers. I strongly suspect that his campaign’s aim is to galvanize Republican voters from small towns and cities by showing them that he both understands their anger at current national policies, and respects the accomplishments they have achieved within their communities despite those larger issues. The Trump campain seems willing to have other candidates spend their efforts selling the GOP to the big cities and the rural populace. And I’m thinking that they’re willing to bet that the recent upsurge in Republican victories at the state level is indicative of a trend from less urban cities in favor of more Republican candidates. If the battle against the Democratic party is to be won, the groundwork needs to be layed early in these battleground towns and cities across the country.

Third point: electoral math is pretty arcane when it comes to presidential elections. Without an exhaustive examination of both delegate assignments for the convention and the relationship between the campaign’s strength in a state and it’s vote count in the Electoral College, only possible after the primaries have concluded, the real likelihood of a Trump presidency will remain up for debate.

Thomas Jefferson thought that public higher-education was a necessary part of the security of any free republic. The better educated your electorate is, the less likely they will be taken in en masse by some demagogic tyrant. Knowledge most certainly is the very best cure for ignorance. While you don’t need formal education to attain it, it’s certainly a lot easier to learn for a lot of people when they’re at school than when they’re guiding their own lessons.

The skyrocketing costs of higher education are a consequence of a feedback loop. Government subsidized tuition has made it so that more and more students can attend colleges and universities. Because federal financial aid is guaranteed to schools up front, regardless of the success of students, the schools have a fiscal motives to accept as many students as they physically can and keep them on campus for as long as they are able to do so. The school grows and spends money on upgrading facilities, they need more faculty so they have to hire more expensive professors, then because they’re a larger school they decide they need to pay their higher-ups more in salary. And there is no direct check on how much a school can charge for tuition, so the people who benefit from such things elect to raise it farther and farther. The government’s guaranteeing their revenue, after all. It’s pretty much free money to them. Yaay corruption. The answer isn’t to make schooling free for everyone, and it isn’t to stop subsidizing students’ higher educations. I’m firmly of the belief that the same government that kicked off this cycle should be responsible for regulating it. Especially with state own schools, the government absolutely has jurisdiction to tell a board of visitors or whatever that they need to cap their tuition per student at something much more reasonable, then restrict their rate of growth much more aggressively.

Elected officials should do better upholding the platforms they claimed to uphold when their electorate agreed to allow them to take office. Campaign finance issues are a big part of why that isn’t how things work right now – between the political action committees electioneering races and the lobbyists writing legislation that office holders frequently support just to gain favor with someone and don’t even read what they’re supporting, most of the system is set up now to select weak officials who do what they’re told and in return get to keep their positions for about as long as they want. Personally, I think that some variation of term limits could help break that pattern. I’m partial to the non-consecutive term limits that Virginia places on its governors. You can be elected to office as many times as you’re able to get the votes, but you can’t run for the office you just held for the term subsequent to your election. If nothing else, it would at least double the number of people on the board, and it would do a good job of forcing voters to actually make choices rather than just doing whatever the guy who’s already there wants.

Examine the problem you want to resolve, break it into pieces along practical lines (a single action or set of related actions tied together), prioritize what actions need to be taken first and what you need in order to take them, then take your plan of action and start following it, adapting to unforseen or mistaken variables as you encounter them.
Often, people already do some variation of this process, so the second stage of problem solving is what usually holds them up.
Typically there’s an underlying assumption that you won’t be able to take the action which you see as necessary to resolve one or more parts of the problem. You can get around that lack of self-confidence in two ways. First, do the things you do think you can do, even if they seem out of order from your initial prioritisation. Second, work to find alternative actions you could take which might get you close to resolving the problem-part you have issue with. It’ ok to ask for help or take the time to look into how other people have addressed similar chalenges. You might also consider what you would be able to do without the constraints that you feel are restricting your options, then decide whether the perceived constraints are significant in the face of the problem possibly being resolved.
On the whole, the most important thing to remember is that inaction pretty much guarantees that your problem won’t be solved. So just do something, and use that first step as the groundwork for all the rest.

Miranda Warnings subvert the constitutional protections guaranteeing defendants fair trials and freedom from self-incrimination. ”Fair” was never supposed to only mean that all defendants would receive the same quality of justice as other defendants. It has always been meant to protect the citizens of this country from abuse at the hands of a government which unlike most criminal defendants can bring to bear effectively overwhelming financial and human resources. The Fifth Amendment in particular was written to protect the people from what was understood to be the inherent tendency of powerful organizations – the abuse of power.
Miranda Warnings provide a veneer of constitutionality to what amounts to institutionalized abuse of government power. Under the Miranda system, defendants are told to either risk self-incrimination based on something as unreliable as unresearched personal testimony, or to distrust the very law enforcement officials with whom the safety and security of their community has been entrusted. The power and responsability held by prosecutors and the police is immense. Their actions on a daily basis can save, ruin, or end the lives of ordinary people. But they are also human beings, imperfect and falable. The very category of people the Bill of Rights was designed to restrain.
The simplest way to reverse the endrun that has been made against the integrity of the justice system is to overturn a key aspect of the Miranda System which was designed explicitly to empower criminal prosecutors and investigators at the expense of fairness for defendants.
“Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law” should be abolished. It invites investigators to use deceit and trickery to provoke defendants into what amounts to coerced testimony against themselves. In fact, when the heirarchical displays of power and authority that the criminal justice system has worked so hard to wrap itself in are put at the table, there is very little that can happen which doesn’t rise to the level of coersion so long as the State’s record of evidence against defendants is in any way given the benefit of the doubt.
As things stand now, testimony in court by a law enforcement officer regarding that officer’s recollection of a defendant’s statements implicating the defendant in a crime is treated as valid evidence. If that officer is asked to recall statements by the defendant which benefit the defense, then the testimony is ignored as hearsay. In truth, all statements made to law enforcement officials outside of court should be treated as hearsay evidence. Statements are valuable tools for investigators to follow as potential leads to actual evidence, but they demonstrably do not stand up to the standards of rigor which should be necessary to argue beyond reasonable doubt against a defendant’s presumed innocence.

I was listening to a radio show the other day, addressing the tax platforms for some of the current candidates for the 2016 presidential race, and I had a moment when the story became focused on philosophies of taxation where I just felt like some things became clear for me which before had been just a jumbled mess of disparate ideas. There’s been a great debate in the halls of political philosophy regarding the ideas of two renowned thinkers: John Rawls and Robert Nozick. The core of the disagreement between the two schools of thought is that on the one hand Rawls argued that human equality can only be seen when everyone behaves as though people with the least opportunity and resources are the true baseline for the assessment of justice (the veil of ignorance), while on the other hand Nozick argued that equality and justice are in truth based on individual choice and responsibility with little or no security for people whose choices are severely delimited by circumstances beyond their control.

Today, the prevailing winds seem to be blowing in support of Rawls’ take on things. Social safety nets and mandatory insurance requirements are designed, at least in theory, to force the equalization of opportunity in their spheres. Of course, equalizing opportunity in most cases ends up meaning that lots of people lose resources to programs that often help them less than other options they might have been able to afford without having been forced to pay up.

Don’t get me wrong, the Nozick argument isn’t flawless either. I mean, what’s a real alternative to progressive taxes and social spending programs that doesn’t end up with a very large portion of society effectively disenfranchised by economic destitution? The realities of human psychology are such that even though such a system might remove systemic barriers that might allow people without financial resources to bootstrap themselves into solvency, there is real risk that most would not just out of simple depression.

There’s no way that a truly free market of choice will ever become the American way. And if we do end up with a staunch Rawlsian at the head of our national ship, it’s very likely that in the near future the way people of means account their wealth will be changed. By significantly higher tax rates. And the argument behind this is often a plea to help the helpless. It’s a noble plea. Helping people who need help is a good thing to do. But raising the progressive tax schedule rates doesn’t just carry out the promised “tax the rich to feed the poor,” it also increases the tax burden on the large portion of the population caught in the middle.

Being middle class doesn’t just mean that you take home more pay than you would if you lived below the poverty line. For most it means that your hard work and able problem solving have led you to be able to live a life of dignity. Rather than sacrifice that dignity for the optics of appearing to help the less fortunate, why not mix up the schools of thought a bit and come up with a plan that preserves human dignity across the board and helps alleviate poverty at the same time?

I’m not talking about doing away with taxes. Or raising or lowering them for anyone. This philosophical argument actually has very little to do directly with tax policies. Just know that if things go a certain way with the next election, you could end up paying half or more of your income for tax programs that may not necessarily be the best at carrying out the requirements of their mandate. But just because you don’t want to have that forced upon you doesn’t mean that you think the status quo for social programs are adequate to the task of helping the helpless either.

Don’t expect socialism to win the day, next November. But maybe it’s time to establish a new baseline for yourself regarding the disposition of your own wealth. It is possible to help people without involving the government. And you don’t need to help an entire population to make a real difference. If you have more, financially, than you need or use, then maybe you can afford to see yourself helping others – not through a veil of ignorance, but one of knowledge. If enough people vote with their help, then maybe both the Rawlsians and the Nozickians can have what they want: a wealthier, healthier, and more dignified society.

Once Upon A College Night