Paul Ryan figured it out before most Republicans did-- and way before Trump began threatening to provoke a riot if the Republican Establishment steals the nomination from him at the Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland in July. Ryan moved quickly to have guns banned from the arena, even though Ohio is a proud open-carry state, where homicidal Republicans can go to a bar and get drunk and shoot everyone in it.
It's become pretty clear since we first started reporting about it in December that "the Republican Establishment" wants to hand Paul Ryan the presidential nomination on the same model silver platt
The NeverTrump movement doesn't really seem to be getting off the ground, although some of the OurPrinciplesPAC ads aren't bad, even if they seem to be largely ineffective. Over the weekend, the New York Times' Alexander Burns and Jonathan Martin looked at the GOP establishment's puny efforts against the fascist bully who's been running circles around them.
Do you remember the crackpot-- "I'm not a witch"-- teabagger Christine O'Donnell from Delaware? She has no illusions about stopping Trump but indicated to CNN's Brooke Baldwin that the Democrats' conservative establishment pick might be a better option than Trump. "Clinton, if you look at some of her policies, she's a moderate. She's not a far-left liberal... I don't know what I would do if Trump became the nominee...
Now he says he's not interested in running for president, not even to save his party-- not to mention his country-- from the monstrosity pictured just above. Thursday, with every bit of hype and brouhaha the Republican Party Establishment can still manage to muster, Ryan daddy-figure Mitt Romney kicked off a new phase in his reluctant candidate's sub-rosa campaign for the GOP nomination.
We've been warning for months that if the Republican Establishment manages to force Herr Trumpf to walk into the Cleveland convention with less than 50% of the delegates and is able to actually pull off a deadlocked/brokered convention, there's a good chance the GOP nominee will be Paul Ryan. We've been urging the unimaginative polling companies to start including Ryan in their surveys.
The fix is inWhen the polling organizations do their head-to-head match-ups between Bernie and Trumpf, Cruz and Rubio and between Hillary and Trumpf, Cruz and Rubio, they ought to start including Paul Ryan. I'm not kidding... the conservative establishment is gung-ho on keeping Trumpf (and Cruz) from winning the nomination and if Rubio continues to be too implausible, Ryan will be the readymade "compromise" candidate "everyone" can be happy with.
Not even Herr Trumpf calling Cruz a "pussy" tonight at a rally in Manchester-- for not being as gung-ho as he should be about torturing people-- could knock the Rubio robot out of the news. But no one could have gotten more of a hard-on from Rubio's agony at the hands of Chris Christie Saturday night than Paul Ryan.
The Republican establishment-- weepy (and alarmed) that their relatively mainstream candidates are attacking each other instead of Herr Trumpf-- still hasn't given up on their dream to pull a fast one in July when they have their convention in Cleveland.
