It sounds ridiculous, I know. The Grand Old Party, the party of Lincoln, could never want Donald Trump. Everybody knows that the ‘elite’ wants Marco Rubio or Jeb Bush. Trump, with his crazy brew of vulgar populism and economic nationalism, is not their guy.
The trouble is, as I wrote in my Spectator piece this week, Trumpmania has been knocking the Republican National Committee’s preferences flat — and the establishment candidates are doing a brilliant job of cancelling each other out. Some party bigwigs are therefore coming to terms with the idea of Trump. Major players behind Romney’s 2012 campaign are now reportedly ‘trying to find their way into Trump’s orbit’. And Trump himself has been showing off about how the establishment is ‘warming up’ to him.
For the GOP elite, the real nightmare is not Trump but Ted Cruz — at the moment, the only person who looks capable of stopping ‘The Donald’.
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