This week I was without my trusty Sirius XM radio which gave me over 150 stations and was instead at the mercy of public AM and FM Radio. I was struck by how total the conversion of the Republican Party from the Party of Lincoln to the Party of Trump has been. Yes, there are prominent Republican hold outs (the Bush family, Mitt Romney and a slew of Senators) who won’t attend the GOP convention and businesses that have pulled out of funding the Republican Convention to the point where party convention bigwigs are virtually begging Republican fatcat Sheldon Adelson for a $6 million donation.
But my immersion into traditional broadcast radio was was extensive — more than 20 hours of radio monitoring of AM and FM this week. As I drove long distances, in market after market, as I’d lose some channels and be able to get others, broadcast radio was dominated by the conservative entertainment complex, all of its assumptions, and the red-meat partisan rhetoric used to saw off and maintain a demographic to deliver to advertisers.
If I heard a newscast extended interview, of if some newspaper editorial writer was interviewed, they talked about Donald Trump as if he was the same kind of candidate as a George W. Bush, Mitt Romney. One station had an extended interview with a GOPer who compared Trump to Ronald Reagan (forget that Nancy Reagan made it known she was revolted by the comparison and reportedly asked two former Reagan aides to write an op ed saying Trump was no Reagan, and that Reagan’s adult children insist Trump in no way, shape or form resembles their dad and the way he operated). All of these interviews dissed Democrats in general and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in particular throwing in references to Bill Clinton’s womanizing as President to boot.
It was like listening to one continuous Fox News broadcast OR RNC commercial with assumptions that Democrats were all the bad guys, independent voters were either low information voters or in the other camp, and that Hillary Clinton was a biggest threat, to the American constitution and the free world’s survival.
The one consistently good news and serious analysis source on AM: Los Angeles’ superb CBS all-news radio KNX. I finally fled to XM where I could listen to KPBS, National Public Radio, and BBC.
It was clear the GOP’s talk radio political culture was now firmly in back of Trump — and all that he represents that makes his supporters love him and many Americans now utterly loath him.
And now we see the final vestiges of the final pocket of resistance known as Never Trump crash and burn:
Republicans’ last realistic chance to deny Donald Trump their presidential nomination fizzled Thursday, as a key rules change proposal failed to get enough votes to reach the convention floor next week.
Leaders of the Free the Delegates group needed 28 votes of the 112-member Convention Rules Committee to force the full Republican National Convention to consider their “conscience clause.”
Instead, the most group leader and Colorado delegate Kendal Unruh could muster was about 21.
“Donald Trump is the presumptive nominee. There should be absolutely no question as to who we vote for,” said Arizona delegate Bruce Ash.
How many votes Unruh had exactly isn’t known, because she failed to demand a recorded vote before the chairman ruled it closed. On a previous vote by Trump supporters to shut down debate on her proposal, the vote was 77-21.
The vote followed weeks of a publicity campaign and lobbying effort by Unruh’s Free the Delegates and the supporting Delegates Unbound group. Unruh made her final appeal to her fellow 111 committee members, telling them her proposal restored their right to vote their conscience.
“That is a God-given right that shouldn’t be taken away by the RNC or any state,” she said.
When she began a public campaign to stop Trump last month, she had hoped for 57 votes, a majority. With that kind of backing, she believed she could have won over a majority of the 2,472 total delegates to support the rule, which in turn would have ended Trump’s chances.
In the past couple of weeks, though, Unruh downgraded her goal to 28 votes, enough for a “minority report” from the Convention Rules Committee. That would have carried far less weight on the convention floor, but still would have guaranteed a floor vote.
The Trump campaign and RNC leaders wanted to avoid a public display of internal party strife at the convention, which they hope instead to choreograph as a show of unity behind their nominee. They lobbied delegates to oppose Unruh and back Trump.
Utah Sen. Mike Lee, a delegate and a Trump critic, pleaded with Trump to recognize why so many are uneasy with him and to do something to mend fences. “This angst isn’t going to go away just because we papered over it with rules,” Lee said. “I say to Mr. Trump, and those aligned with him, make the case to those delegates who want to have a voice.”
It’s unclear whether Lee will get a response that offers him much comfort. At about the same time that Lee was speaking in committee late Thursday, Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort was sending this Tweet: “Anti-Trump people get crushed at Rules Committee. It was never in doubt: Convention will honor will of people & nominate @realdonaldtrump.”
Some Republicans will not wish to admit it, but their party has now been re-branded.
And while some conservative talkers, conservative writers, and conservative radio station announcers and owners will not want to admit it and try to change the subject, Trump’s comments on women, Muslims, Hispanics and continued efforts to polarize and stir up hate are part of the party’s new branding. And yes, Democrats and members of the news media, polls have been wrong all year and Trump could win.
As the GOP convention unfolds, the debut of the new Trumpublican Party will officially occur, even as some insist its not a debut and little has really changed. If Trump wins, it’s a new era for the GOP and the party will have been rebranded. If Trump loses, then the party will have to scramble to try and rebrand, much as Johnson & Johnson had to scramble to change the decimated image of Tylenol during the infamous product-tampering Tylenol murders of 1982.
Trump adds a new strain of toxicity, prevarication, and provocation that requires once principled Republicans to sell their political souls and go along with their party and become seeming clones of the humbled go-to-McDonald’s-for-Trump New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie. The bulk of warnings from key conservatives about Trump during the primary have evaporated as the sole goal is to attain partisan power.
As the final remnants of Never Trump disintegrate, Charles Pierce sums up Trump’s alarmingly unique role in American politics in Esquire:
Trump now has taken his truthless palaver to another level entirely. This is what he said on the stump in Indiana on Wednesday, when he was taking auditions for the men who care so little for their country that they are desperate to be on a ticket with a serial arsonist.
“The other night you had 11 cities potentially in a blow-up stage. Marches all over the United States—and tough marches. Anger. Hatred. Hatred! Started by a maniac! And some people ask for a moment of silence for him. For the killer!”
To be blunt, this didn’t happen.There is no evidence from any news source that this happened. By anyone. Anywhere. Nobody can find anyone who “called for a moment of silence” for the mass killer of policemen. Nobody has counted “11 cities” that are potentially on the verge of a racial holy war. RaHoWa, cry the white-supremacists. And now the presumptive Republican presidential nominee has joined the chorus. That’s where his rhetoric has led him, and far too many people have followed along.
Yeah, but it was Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg who “crossed the line.” Jesus, these people.
Nobody can find anyone who called for a moment of silence. Nobody can list the 11 cities.
Pierce later writes:
Damn them all now.
Damn the delegates who will vote for this man. Damn the professional politicians who will fall in line behind him or, worse, will sit back and hope this all blows over so the Republican Party once again will be able to relegate the poison this man has unleashed to the backwaters of the modern conservative intellectual mainstream, which is where it has been useful for over four decades. Damn the four hopeless sycophants who want to share a stage with him for four months. Damn all the people who will come here and speak on his behalf. Damn all the thoughtful folk who plumb his natural appeal for anything deeper than pure hatred.
….Damn all the people who will vote for him, and damn any progressives who sit this one out because Hillary Rodham Clinton is wrong on this issue or that one. Damn all the people who are suggesting they do that. And damn all members of the media who treat this dangerous fluke of a campaign as being in any way business as usual. Any support for He, Trump is, at this point, an act of moral cowardice. Anyone who supports him, or runs with him, or enables his victory, or even speaks well of him, is a traitor to the American idea.
Damn, to name one, Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, the zombie-eyed granny-starver from the state of Wisconsin, now exposed as the feckless political weakling he’s always been.
He concludes:
Here is the truth. Nobody called for a moment of silence for Micah Johnson. Eleven U.S. cities are not on the brink of racial violence. He, Trump just made that s–t up so his followers can stay afraid and angry at the people he wants them to fear and hate. This lie was a marching order and the Party of Lincoln is right in step with him, straight into the burning Reichstag of this man’s mind.
Welcome to the 2016 Republican convention: a four-day celebration of the ritual suicide of American democracy.
With balloons.
Truth and long held principles no longer matter. We’re seeing a lesson in how authoritarians come to power, enabled and helped by many who fear opposing them could mean they lose their power, or that opposing them means they could face roadblocks on their future political aspirations or who act out of outright cowardice. With a news media that is as addicted to giving Trump free coverage as a crack addict is to crack and that throws him more softballs than all of the elementary schools in the state of California within a given year.
The Never Trump crowd had guts — even though their very premise raised serious issues about the morality of thwarting the will of millions of Republican primary voters.
Never Trump is dead; Long Live (hopefully for not too long) the new Trumpublican Party.
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Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.