Gail Collins's most recent New York Times column is under the headline "Intervening Donald" and begins:
Do you think it’s true that the Republicans are trying to get Rudy Giuliani and Newt Gingrich to do an intervention with an out-of-control Donald Trump?
This is the best rumor of the summer, so let’s hope so. If they televised it, no one in the world would be watching the Olympics.
And she proceeds to explain why it is hilarious to think of Giuliani and Gingrich in the role of the mature ones. The whole thing is enjoyable, and you can read it here.
Surfing hither and thither, I see that the prospect of the Republicans somehow dumping Trump is a trending topic. It seems there are two scenarios. In one Trump, sufficiently in touch with reality to see the approaching train wreck, drops out himself in order to avoid a humiliating defeat. (Real men don't lose to bitches.) He would drum up some excuse, perhaps about how everything is in some undefined way "rigged" against him. In the other scenario, some Big Boy Republicans manage to give the boot to Trump, in order to spare the party from an electoral disaster in November.
Once Trump's out, I don't know who would be next: some people think Pence, others Cruz . . . the process by which someone would be selected is opaque.
I doubt either scenario will play out, though I can see why some think it's possible. Among that subset of Americans who listen to talk radio or record Morning Joe to watch in the evening, either fast forwarding through the commercials or using the breaks to check in at RealClearPolitics.com, this is the season for hyperventilating over every new poll and news nugget. I'm saying there's a lot of overreacting as well as overactive imagining. It takes a lot of fortitude for us members of the overwrought population to tell ourselves that the political equivalent of the Normandy landing is not going to happen tomorrow, or the day after, and that the wildest events will likely subside into a result within a standard deviation of the mean: Trump winning the red states, Clinton the blue and (we can hope) Arizona and North Carolina as well as all of the purplish gray ones. What I'm saying is that it looks bad for the Republicans, but it's probably not as bad as it looks this morning.
If, however, I was on a debate team and assigned to argue the other side, I'd point out that a central point of Trump's campaign has been that he's a "winner," as compared to his opponents, who are "stupid people," "losers," and that America will "win again" if it elects him because (staying on point) he is a "winner" who will "make America great again." Consequently, the whole point of Trump's candidacy recedes as he begins to look more and more like a loser, and there is a real chance that the bottom drops out entirely. During the Republican primary season, he was always crowing about "the polls," which showed him winning, which proved he was a "winner," and there is nothing people who are losing love more than hooking up with a winner. It's dangerous for him to talk about polls these days, however. Earlier this week Kelly Ayotte, the vulnerable Republican incumbent senator from New Hampshire, criticized Trump's deplorable statements about the Muslim soldier killed in action in Iraq in 2004. In predictable Trumpean fashion, he retorted that Ayotte was "weak" and that he was doing better than she in polls of New Hampshire voters. As if on cue, a new poll came out a day or two later showing Ayotte trailing her Democratic challenger by ten points--and Trump trailing Clinton in the state by fifteen.
For Republicans, the nightmare scenario is that their down-ballot candidates run ahead of Trump and still lose. If that result looks like it's coming around the bend, maybe something more eye-opening than an intervention will occur.
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