{"id":83183,"date":"2015-12-24T14:43:48","date_gmt":"2015-12-24T22:43:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=83183"},"modified":"2015-12-24T14:45:11","modified_gmt":"2015-12-24T22:45:11","slug":"george-will-beating-hillary-less-important-than-stopping-trump","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=83183","title":{"rendered":"George Will: Beating Hillary Less Important Than Stopping Trump"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ben Shapiro writes<\/a>: As the end of the year approaches, Donald Trump is solidly ensconced at the top of the Republican polls nationally. The man just behind him? Senator Sen. Ted Cruz, an establishment bugaboo. The establishment\u2019s favorite candidate, Senator Sen. Marco Rubio, is currently running far behind in national polling, a distant third in Iowa, and in a deadlock with Cruz and New Jersey Governor Chris Christie for second in New Hampshire.<\/p>\n

Panic time.<\/p>\n

So, here\u2019s the establishment roundup for Christmas week.<\/p>\n

If You Support Donald Trump, You Want to Lose. Earlier this week, Bret Stephens of The Wall Street Journal unleashed a petulant column accusing all Trump and Cruz backers of begging for defeat. \u201cLet us now pledge to elect Hillary Clinton as the 45th president of the United States,\u201d he snarked. \u201cLet\u2019s do this because it\u2019s what we want. Maybe secretly, maybe unconsciously, but desperately. We want four\u2014and probably eight\u2014more years of cable-news neuralgia. We want to drive ourselves to work as Mark Levin or Laura Ingraham scratch our ideological itches until they bleed a little. We want the refiner\u2019s fire that is our righteous indignation at a country we claim no longer to recognize\u2014ruled by impostors and overrun by foreigners.\u201d Stephens specifically singled out Cruz for criticism, calling him a flip-flopper \u201chappy to be on any side of an issue so long as he can paint himself as a \u2018real Republican.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

If We Have to Lose to Beat Trump, So Be It. When establishment columnists weren\u2019t painting large swaths of the Republican base as politically suicidal, they were calling for suicide. George Will, iconic columnist, wrote today, \u201cConservatives\u2019 highest priority now must be to prevent Trump from winning the Republican nomination in this, the GOP\u2019s third epochal intraparty struggle in 104 years.\u201d Never mind that Mitt Romney strayed from conservatism so far that he invented Obamacare; never mind that Sen. John McCain crafted campaign finance reform and amnesty. No, it\u2019s Trump who singularly represents the death of the conservative ideal.<\/p>\n

Of course, Will might just be miffed that Trump recently said \u201cI think I have a much higher IQ\u2026 You have these guys like George Will. He sits with the little spectacles. If he didn\u2019t have the spectacles, you wouldn\u2019t think he\u2019s smart because he\u2019s wrong so much.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hey, Anybody Wanna Start a Third Party? Months ago, establishment Republicans complained that Donald Trump would not vow to forgo a third party run. Now, they\u2019re thinking of a third party themselves. Weekly Standard editor-in-chief Bill Kristol tweeted:<\/p>\n

Crowd-sourcing: Name of the new party we\u2019ll have to start if Trump wins the GOP nomination? Suggestions welcome at editor@weeklystandard.com<\/p>\n

\u2014 Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) December 20, 2015<\/p>\n

And as I explained earlier this week:<\/p>\n

Politico\u2019s Jeff Greenfield says, \u201cIf the operatives I talked with are right, Trump running as a Republican could well face a third-party run \u2013 from the Republicans themselves\u201d\u2026.Jeb Bush\u2019s aides \u201cbegan looking into the possibility of making a clear break with Trump \u2013 potentially with the candidate stating that, if Trump were the nominee, Bush would not support him.\u201d Last week, MSNBC\u2019s Joe Scarborough said that former Mississippi governor Haley Barbour \u201cand a lot of the Republican leaders would much rather Hillary Clinton be President of the United States than have Donald Trump represent them as a Republican.\u201d And in November, The Hill reported that \u201cGOP establishment donors have confided to The Hill that for the first time in recent memory, they find themselves contemplating not supporting a Republican nominee for president.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ben Shapiro writes: As the end of the year approaches, Donald Trump is solidly ensconced at the top of the Republican polls nationally. The man just behind him? Senator Sen. Ted Cruz, an establishment bugaboo. The establishment\u2019s favorite candidate, Senator … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[29752],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-83183","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-donald-trump"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83183","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=83183"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83183\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":83185,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83183\/revisions\/83185"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=83183"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=83183"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=83183"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}