New York magazine’s Gabriel Sherman interviewed Mitt Romney’s campaign manager Stuart Stevens and they discussed a wide range of topics. At the end, they came to the subject of Donald Trump.
You write in the book that the cruelest lesson in life, and sports, is what if? So what if Donald Trump becomes president?
[Laughs.] He’s not. He’s not! This goes down to, how am going to play in the next Super Bowl? It’s not going to happen. For Donald Trump to win, everything we know about politics has to be wrong. And I don’t think it is. The timing of when it falls apart is always more difficult to know than inevitably that it will.It’s like that Hemingway quote: “How did you go bankrupt? Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.”
Yes. I think there’s a lot of that in politics.
That’s really a two-parter. I touched on this in the last post. If Donald Trump wins the Republican nomination and especially if he becomes the next president, it really means that we’re a much worse lot of people that even the most cynical bastards have ever accused of us being. It’s not so much about what we think we know about politics as it is about what we’d like to believe about ourselves.
After all, for tens years of blogging, I’ve been pegging the conservative movement as having exactly the kind of appeal that Trump is exploiting now. I wasn’t surprised that he caught on. I wasn’t under the misimpression that his so-called screw-ups on John McCain and Megyn Kelly would hurt him and actually predicted that they would help him. But even though I may understand our political opponents better than the both-sides-do-it beltway commentators, that doesn’t mean that I think the country as a whole would opt for Trump’s act. I have too high of an opinion of the American people to believe that they’ve sunk that low.
But I could be wrong.
The second interesting part of that exchange is the Hemingway quote, and a political party can probably go bankrupt in the same manner as the average homeowner or businessperson: gradually, and then suddenly.
There really ought to have been a reckoning in 2009 after everything went to hell and turned to ashes in the mouths of Bush and Cheney, McCain opted for Queen Dumbass of the Northwoods, and we’d seen the Republican Congress evolve from its initial burst of energy in the first days of the Gingrich Revolution into the sordid and sad and appalling spectacle of Jack Abramoff and Mark Foley and Tom DeLay.
But, instead, they doubled and tripled down on the bullshit and idiocy.
So, that whole bit, and the tea parties and the Romney Lie-o-Rama and the drunk Speaker weeping into his cufflinks…
…that was the gradual part.
What we’re getting geared up for at the moment is the sudden part.
