Acts20.com

This is the last paragraph of a pretty good (but long) article: Maybe there was never 'An Establishment'..........................nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/03/frank-rich-trump-didnt-hijack-gop.html?mid=full-rss-diThe conventional wisdom that Trump is “destroying” the GOP may prove as wrongheaded as the assumption in 1964 that Barry Goldwater had done the same. Win or lose, Trump, like Goldwater, may be further hastening the party’s steady consolidation rightward. For all their blustery threats of third-party campaigns, defections to Hillary, and other acts of rebellion, Republican elites in the political game are more likely to bend to Trump than the other way around, no matter how many conservative op-ed columnists beg them not to do so. They still want to preserve any shred of power they can, and to do that, they must pitch in and try to win. You’ll notice that just about the only Republican politicians or campaign operatives who are vocal in the #NeverTrump claque are either congressmen who are retiring this year, party potentates who have long been out of power (Christine Todd Whitman, Ken Mehlman, J. C. Watts, Mel Martinez), or, as Trump would say, losers (anyone who served in the campaign hierarchies of Romney or Jeb, any neocon who served as a Bush-Cheney architect of the Iraq War). Everyone else will keep on doing what senators and governors like Orrin Hatch and Jeff Sessions and Paul LePage have steadily been doing: They will appease Trump or surrender to him altogether on the most favorable terms they can, for “the good” of the party and the ticket in November. They will make their peace with the art of the deal.*This article appears in the March 21, 2016 issue of New York Magazine Some facts but mostly just my [email protected]/