Serving the High Plains
Serving the High Plains
The 2016 presidential election showcased both major political parties with an unyielding narrative. This is the second of a two-part series that attempts to connect some political dots to arrive at how and why we are in our current state of affairs.
This is the Republican story.
Hillary Clinton was going to be the presidential nominee for the Democrats and Republicans smelled blood in the water. There was no way Hillary could win an election when you considered the Obama administration’s foreign policy failures, the Benghazi scandal, and her ties to the Clinton Foundation with its income from foreign governments and Wall Street fat cats. When you factored in her mishandling of classified information on an unsecured data server, she would be lucky to survive a federal indictment and jail term.
Prior to Trump entering the race, Republicans had put together a dream team of more than a dozen candidates that included sitting and former governors, senators and business executives as well as a preeminent surgeon. These included a mix of ethnicities (white, black, Hispanic and Asian) and genders (one woman) with an average age of 57. Clinton would be 69 at inauguration.
On June 16, 2015, Donald Trump changed all the existing hypotheses when he announced his candidacy for the Republican nomination. Republican insiders were sure that Trump had zero chance to win the nomination.
Jeb Bush had put together a campaign war chest of $165 million and was the declared front runner. How any sane analyst could ascertain that the American voter would establish a Bush succession to the presidency escapes me.
The Republican establishment agreed that any other candidates would be preferable to Trump and the “never Trumpers” were born.
When Trump began running through candidates like Sherman went through Georgia, alarm spread through establishment Republicans and 50 eminent national security specialists signed an open letter announcing they would never support Trump for the presidency. Even after Trump won the nomination, a number of these masterminds publicly refused to support him. Who did they plan to vote for? Anybody but Trump.
After the election, for the first time in my memory, the party failed to come together behind their elected president. Some Republican legislators claim Trump is lacking in competence and stability while they wallow in hollow praise from their Democrat enablers as they collude to frustrate the president’s legislative agenda.
Never Trumpers and Republican insiders can’t forgive Hillary for losing the election, or Trump for winning it. President Trump will confound them again when he wins re-election in 2020.
Rube Render is the Curry County Republican chairman. Contact him at: