Like many of us here, I've been enjoying the seeming havoc Donald Trump's presidential run has been churning up on the Republican side. That is, until I saw this article by Mark Ames (unlocked link good until around 2:30 pm Eastern Time Monday, August 31), which summarizes the long and sleazy shared political history of Trump and his pal Roger Stone, a master of the Long Con.
Ames isn't buying the alleged Trump-Stone split. Not at all. (Nor is he buying the alleged contempt, as reported by a singularly credulous and/or complicit Washington Post writer, that Trump - like Stone, a longtime associate of the Bush family - supposedly has for Jeb Bush.) He thinks it's part of a plan which, via a form of political judo, is intended to squash the Tea Party for good so the establishment Republican Jeb can win the nomination if not the White House. In my opinion, Jeb is coming close to wrecking that plan, should it exist.
More on all this below the orange fold.
To start things off, here's a nice, succinct precis of how Mr. Ames sees things:
The three main takeaways you need to keep in mind in the Roger Stone-Donald Trump story are:
1. Roger Stone’s dirty tricks specialty is manipulating voter fractures, and weaponizing anti-establishment politics to serve the electoral needs of mainstream Republican candidates;
2. Roger Stone and Donald Trump have been working together since the mid-1980s, mostly on sleazy campaigns to help Trump’s casino business, but also in politics;
3. Roger Stone and Donald Trump worked together in at least two major “black bag” operations manipulating anti-establishment politics to help the mainstream Republican presidential candidate.
Ames then lists a long series of incidents from Stone's and Trump's past, including the destruction of the Muskie campaign in order to guarantee Nixon a weak Democratic challenger in 1972, amply proving the truth of these three takeaways. (Stone's efforts at manipulating fringe groups on the right and left to either aid the GOP establishment or become Republican themselves is dealt with in more detail
here.)
And who is the mainstream Republican candidate this election cycle? None other than John Ellis Bush.
Here is where I depart from Mr. Ames:
1. I don't think that Jeb, or anyone else in his immediate family, is working directly with Roger Stone, much less Donald Trump. And that's probably how Stone wants it; he knows full well that his sleazy reputation is known even by tyro journos, and that his clients can't afford to be openly linked to him. However, this creates a problem when the candidate you're trying to help is damned near too stupid to breathe. To wit:
2. I think that because Stone can't tell Jeb what to do or how to behave, directly or indirectly, he has to rely on Jeb to understand that all he need do to win the nomination is to keep quiet while his GOP rivals frantically follow the Pied Piper Trump ever further rightward into general-election unelectability, then be the last moderate standing when his rivals destroy themselves. (If this strategy sounds familiar, it's essentially what Kerry did to win the Democratic nomination in 2004: He just sat back and watched as two of his most powerful rivals, Gephardt and Lieberman, destroyed themselves taking down Howard Dean, then he swept in and claimed the nomination almost by default.)
But neither Jeb nor any of his official minders understand this, which is why Jeb is racing as frantically as Ted Cruz or Lindsey Graham to out-Trump Trump on the campaign trail.
It's pathetic, really. Jeb started out as the guy who was going to make the Republican Party safe for all Latinos, not just the rich ones who came from Cuba when Castro shut down their casinos and bordellos in 1959. He's now chanting "anchor babies" like it was a magic spell. Hell, he's even managed to own-goal himself not just with Latinos, but with Asian-Americans as well.
This is why I have a feeling that Trump may well start winding down his campaign soon, before Jeb continues to be like the other GOP lemmings following Trump over the cliff. I predict that Trump's big announcement slated for next week may well be geared towards putting the brakes on his run, perhaps by showing his establishment-Republican bona fides by promising not to make a third-party run. Since a big chunk of Trump's popularity is based on his carefully-maintained tough-talking outsider persona, his openly bowing to establishment GOP wishes may put a dent in his armor where the Southern-Strategy-addled Republican base voters are concerned.