Marco Rubio can't cut it. He's 2016's awkwardly fully-scripted candidate, an imperfect vessel for the Republican Establishment. His focus-tested, sanitized message is confusing and sometimes incoherent, and he is hopelessly torn between his original Tea Party backers and the billionaires and party establishment types who hope he can save them and their racket from the clutches of fascist-oriented Trumpf and/or Cruz.
Thursday saw Herr Trumpf trolling tweeting out helpful suggestions to the opponents he wants to bury: Jeb should stop being ashamed he's a Bush, Cruz should start a court case about his eligibility.
Few of the growing number of Republicans opposing Trumpf say their opposition is rooted in what's good for the country. It's about what's good for the fucked-up political party they share with him-- albeit uneasily-- that spawned him in the first place. I don't recall ever seeing so many elected officials from a party saying they will not support a candidate if he's their party's official nominee.
Mark Bowden hung out with the then-50 year old Herr Trumpf in 1996, on assignment for Playboy and just wrote about the awkward experience for Vanity Fair. "Trump," he wrote, "struck me as adolescent, hilariously ostentatious, arbitrary, unkind, profane, dishonest, loudly opinionated, and consistently wrong. He remains the most vain man I have ever met.
