David Frum Has an Asinine Plan for the GOP to Beat Trump
This week the in formerly respectable pages of The Atlantic, David Frum critiques efforts by the mainstream GOP to defeat Trump. He doesn’t care for John Kasich’s campaign and super PAC suggesting the Donald is a fascist and/or a boob. He also isn’t impressed by his “friend” and former Rand Paul, Rick Perry and (briefly) Scott Walker staffer and professional libertarian Liz Mair heading an LLC devoted to painting Trump as an overgrown adolescent.
Frum is smart, you see. He knows Trump’s fans don’t care if he is a fascist and/or boob who frequently behaves like a child. Good news though, he DOES have an idea he is sure will work:
No, if you want to take down Trump, there is only one line of attack that will work—but it is an attack that requires the party leadership and its donors to attain some critical distance from their own beliefs and points of view.
Until he read Ann Coulter’s book this spring, Trump seemed to have been a perfectly conventional business Republican on immigration. In a 2012 interview, in fact, he blamed Romney’s loss on taking a too-tough line on the issue.
If Trump said those things in one interview, recorded only in print, it’s likely he said them in others, recorded in video and audio, the raw material of the attack ad. Where he is in 2015 is not where he was in 2012—and that could suggest that where he is in 2015 is not where he’ll be if elected president. Every politician changes his mind. Accusations of flip-flopping hurt because they open the possibility that where there is a flip-flop, there may in future be a flop-flip—that the position adopted for political advantage will be jettisoned when political advantage signals a different direction.
So all the GOP has to do is tell its base: “We know you hate immigrants and want them deported en masse…but can you REALLY trust Trump to do this when he did not hold such a position 3 years ago?!?”
Brilliant!