Former George W. Bush speechwriter and current contributing editor at Politico Magazine Matt Latimer seems to be getting a big kick out of how much
Donald Trump has upended the Republican primary, and is particularly gleeful that his former boss's little brother is getting trounced.
A week after boasting that it would ignore Trump, with its usual Clouseau-like finesse, JebWorld decided to hit Trump every day. Which means every GOP candidate is now playing Donald Trump's game instead of their own—and doing about as well as you'd expect.
The decision to engage him has outsized consequences for the GOP "brand," whatever that is these days. […] Trump single-handedly has moved the GOP to the right on immigration, to the left on free trade and in circles on pretty much everything else. He has the other candidates so confused that they are stepping all over their own messages. After all, how else can one explain Bush's latest effort to show he is not an establishment loser by going flaunting an endorsement from Eric Cantor, the most notorious establishment loser in history? […]
For days now, Jeb has tried to explain his use of the term "anchor babies" to describe the American-born children of illegal immigrants. This purportedly offended someone somewhere—and Bush has been apologizing and yet not apologizing for it ever since. His first defense was that he wasn't impugning Hispanics, but Asians because, as columnist Matt Bai noted, "what Republicans really need right now is another massive nonwhite segment of society that won’t vote for them."
The fracas exposed the stark difference between the two men, their campaigns, their poll numbers. While Trump's response to critics of the term was basically a two-word sentence that starts with an F, poor Jeb was left to implore a reporter, "You give me a better term and I'll use it." Another statement that, thanks to Trump, will follow Bush all the way through the general election, should he ever make it that far.
Ultimately, though, he makes the point that every Republican candidate is just playing Trump's game here, and badly. Every ploy—ignoring him, attacking him, threatening to oust him from the party—none of it works. In light of that, Latimer seems to conclude that the only thing to do is to accept him as the new face of the GOP: "Donald Trump is the frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination. He is not going to be easily thrown off his game. And every day that passes makes it less likely he'll self-destruct. Toss out the campaign playbook you've constructed, and adjust everything accordingly."
What Latimer doesn't get into is that accepting Trump as the face of the party is acknowledging what the Republicans have allowed their party to become by encouraging all the worst impulses of the tea party base.