Why, Exactly, Is Trump Driving Conservatives So Crazy?

[Contrary1]

Posted with no comment, mainly because I don't know what the hell to say...

"People get worked up during presidential campaigns. But the rise of Donald Trump has provoked conservative intellectuals to express their dismay in existential tones. Conservative writers have used terms like unmitigated, unalloyed, potentially unsalvageable disaster to describe a Trump nomination and have declared that they are “fighting for our movement’s existence.” Marco Rubio has made this kind of talk the lingua franca of his once relentlessly chummy campaign, warning that the Republican Party “would split apart” were Trump to prevail. Trump’s opponents have planned for the kinds of dire, schismatic responses not seen in generations of American presidential politics: using the party’s summer convention, normally a scripted infomercial, to wrest the nomination from him. Or even bolting the GOP to start a third party.

The fear inspired by Trump is not merely that he would blow the party’s chances of winning the presidency (though he probably would), or even that he would saddle it with long-term damage among the growing Latino bloc (though he would do that as well). It is that Trump would release the conservative movement’s policy hammerlock on the Republican Party.

The ideological stakes in a fight between conservatives and Trump can be difficult for outsiders to fathom. After all, Trump endorsed Mitt Romney, loathes President Obama, favors a gigantic tax cut, denies global warming, issues ritual praise for Ronald Reagan, and so on. But one place to start — a mystery that reveals a clue — is a recent report in the Times describing frantic efforts to organize an intraparty opposition to Trump. At one meeting, advisers to the Koch brothers, who control a political organization much larger than the actual Republican Party, “characterized Mr. Trump’s record as utterly unacceptable, and highlighted his support for government-funded business subsidies and government-backed health care.”

That may seem odd — Trump’s position on health care is almost indistinguishable from that of the rest of the field. He calls Obamacare a disaster and promises to repeal it and replace it with a sketchily defined alternative that will take care of everybody without any trade-offs. But the basis for the suspicion lies in Trump’s long-ago-renounced support for single-payer health insurance and his more recent promises not to allow people to “die in the streets,” a line that provoked horror in Rubio and Ted Cruz at a February debate. Before Obamacare, those too poor or sick to afford insurance routinely died from illness or suffered horribly. By invoking their suffering, Trump implied that Obamacare did something good..."

More: http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/03/why-is-trump-driving-conservatives-so-crazy.html

[elleng]

1. They think it's unlikely they'd have any control over him.

[Wounded Bear]

2. He's ripping the curtain aside...

frankly, he espouses in public much of what they only say in private. His blatant racist hate speech is a big part of that, coupled with that general disdain for anybody who makes less than 7 figures a year, or who doesn't make their living scamming others out of their wealth to accumulate more personal power.

He is exactly what the scions of the Repub/conservative movement is made up of, without the personal restraint to not say it aloud in public. Every time he takes the podium, he is re-enacting Romney's "47% moment" for all to see. Half of the Repub base wants a "strong leader" though they haven't clue one what that really means. They have no experience with real leadership, so seek out bullying assholes like Trump to worship.

[enigmatic]

3. Absolutely

He's just acting out in public what the Republican insiders and candidates just said in code words.

Absolutely he ripped the curtain aside and by doing so exposed who their base really were, despite their protestations to the contrary.

[mikehiggins]

4. Because he is NOT a conservative. He is a tv personality using his name recognition and

incredibly simplistic passes at what might be a policy of sorts to appeal to those voters who feel the gub'mint and the 'stablisment have betrayed them and they are mad as hell and they ain't gonna take it anymore.

I doubt he means any harm but if he wins the election the real powers that be, the Bushes, etc, will be running the show again before the dust settles.

Real conservatives don't want that anymore than we do but they've created a Frankenstein monster and he's about to tear the castle down around their ears.

Somebody posted a video from Cabaret recently that featured a blond-haired, blue-eyed young Aryan boy in the earliest stages of Nazi Germany singing a song called Tomorrow Belongs To Me. Kid had a great voice (I did myself at that age) but the song was chilling, knowing what was to follow.

Don't even think that it can't happen here.

[Wounded Bear]

7. I get tired of all the "no true Scotsman" arguments...

for 8 years Shrub was great, then all of a sudden "He wasn't a true conservative."

The thing is, it doesn't really matter what labels we hang on them, they are what they are, and Trump is busily destroying their ability to lie to their base. He's doing and saying in the open what they have been using dog whistles to say for decades. I'm not sure it matters what they call themselves. Trump is what the 'conservative' movement has become in this country.

Ye shall know them by their works, rights? I'm fairly well studied about mid 20th Century history. Don't remember Cabaret all that well, but I get what you're saying. No way I think "it can't happen here." It is happening right before our eyes, and I'm fighting back.

As to the Cabaret scene, the Christo-Fascists have been taking over our public schools since the 80's or before. Time to change that back to a more rational, science and fact based system.

[Macattack1]

5. more about establishment than conservatives

..all the conservative intellectuals,pundits,politicians, and tv personalities, are who his supporters can't stand. So the more the "establishment" hates on him...the more support he gets..which in turn, drives the first group bat shit crazy...a lot of his supporters don't like either party.

[EL34x4]

6. Pat Buchanan said it best:

"Trump’s rise represents a rejection of 25 years of Bush Republicanism— an ideology which has destroyed America’s once-great manufacturing core, flooded the country with low-skilled workers, and drained the treasury with ill-advised foreign adventures in the Middle East."

Rubio was the last viable Bush Republican. Now it's Cruz --except the GOP establishment knows in their hearts he is unelectable on a national stage. This doesn't matter though because the establishment knows Hillary will play ball. This is why if Trump gets the nomination, you'll see powerful Republicans offer support to Hillary Clinton. Her stances on social issues my be opposite of theirs but at the top, the 1%, nobody really gives a shit about God, gays, guns and abortion. It's about keeping power and staying rich and Hillary won't upset the apple cart. Trump will. He's not a member of the club. He doesn't know how the game is supposed to be played. This scares the hell out of them.

[Populist_Prole]

9. You nailed the best so far

"True conservatives" don't want any part of economic populism.

[Initech]

8. Because he's pointing out how extreme conservative rhetoric can get?

And they don't like having their true colors shown?