Present at the Destruction

Donald Trump never ceases to amaze, but his answer at a CNN town hall about the pledge he had taken to support the Republican Party's nominee was still jaw-dropping.

Not only did Trump say that the pledge is null and void as far as he's concerned, he also went further and told CNN's Anderson Cooper that he doesn't want the support of Ted Cruz.

Here is a front-runner for a major party's nomination doing all he can to repel his nearest competitor, who has won 5,732,220 votes so far, or 29 percent of the total (Trump has won 39 percent), and speaks for a significant, and highly engaged, faction of the party. Is there any precedent for such a willfully and pointlessly destructive act in modern American politics?

Every rational calculation says that Trump should seek to preserve the pledge. At this point, he is more likely than anyone else to be the nominee and benefit from the support of his competitors. He should want to use every possible lever of unity at his disposal given the threats of an independent conservative candidacy should he win the nomination. And yet, he's done the opposite.

Who can guess why? Stupid pride? A manliness contest, where he wants the likes of Ted Cruz eventually to have to offer his support even after he says he doesn't want it? A disdain for every political convention, even one that might help him?

Whatever the reason, it is yet another sign that Trump is all about himself. In this sense, he is already what the RNC feared when it got him to sign the pledge—a third-party candidate. He's running against the Republican Party from within the Republican Party. He cares nothing about its values or its interests. He favors it exactly to the extent it can be subordinated to him and no further.

Political parties have been riven by clashes of personalities and ideologies before, but it is hard to think of another example of a party so damaged by such a heedless interloper.

It's been a month since the smart commentary after Super Tuesday said that Donald Trump was pivoting to being more presidential and unifying. Since then, he has: declared that he'd consider paying the legal bills of a goon who sucker-punched a black protester; talked of riots at the Republican convention if it doesn't go his way; threatened and mocked Heidi Cruz; and justified his campaign manager's manhandling of a female journalist in the most asinine and dishonest ways.

It has become a truism in the coverage of Trump that nothing can hurt him, and with his base that is certainly true. But everyone else has been paying attention, and Trump has made himself toxic with the general public. His unfavorable ratings are in the 60s and his poor standing with women and the college-educated will make it hard for him to consolidate the white vote on which his chances depend. He's losing to Hillary Clinton in head-to-head matchups by double digits in the Real Clear Politics average.

Events can always intervene, and Hillary certainly has her own weaknesses, but every objective indicator is that nominating Trump will mean a badly divided Republican Party loses in the fall, perhaps badly, maybe even epically.

Since it seems unlikely that Cruz can overtake Trump in the delegate count, the most favorable non-Trump scenario is that Cruz beats him on a second ballot at a convention and has enough anti-establishment credibility to take the edge off the inevitable revolt of the Trump forces.

But surely Trump would do all he could to destroy Cruz and the GOP in retribution for denying him the nomination—lawsuits, innuendo and lies would all be ready and familiar tools at Trump's disposal, even if he didn't try to mount a late independent bid.

Trump's implicit threat is almost certainly lose with me in a simulacrum of a normal process (and lose your integrity and principles along the way), or almost certainly lose without me in an intraparty cataclysm I will make as spectacular as possible. Either way, the GOP is now managing bad outcomes.

It can take some comfort in the fact that presidential candidates in past contentious conventions at least came back to make it close, Jerry Ford in 1976 and Hubert Humphrey in 1968. Moreover, political parties are durable things, and even when they immolate themselves, they tend to rise from the ashes. Republicans won the White House four years after nominating Barry Goldwater, and Democrats four years after nominating George McGovern.

The Trump phenomenon holds important lessons for the GOP, especially about its dated policy creed and out-of-touch elites. But there is no escaping the insuperable weakness and failings of Trump himself, namely his egotism, immaturity, irresponsibility and habitual dishonesty. That one of his most stalwart supporters, Ann Coulter, felt moved to muse that he's "mental" tells you all you need to know about the Republican front-runner.

The RNC thought it had scored a victory so many months ago when Donald Trump signed its pledge. Instead, it was enacting the political equivalent of the fable of the scorpion and the frog.

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