The newest theory floating around the interwebz is that if Donald Trump continues to screw up and fall farther behind Hillary Clinton in polling he will be replaced by a white knight candidate at the convention.
Paul Ryan, Scott Walker, Mitt Romney, all sorts of names have been bandied about. If Hillary suddenly doesn’t have Trump as her foil, the thinking goes, she will suddenly find herself in a really tough race against a more sensible Republican.
The entire thing is nonsense. It isn’t going to happen. If it DID happen, the fallout on the Republican nominee would be unimaginable. Trump won the Republican nomination pretty comfortably. His supporters are fanatically loyal to him. He’s whined through the entire process of being treated unfairly.
Do you think Trump and his rabid followers are going to just line up behind someone else if he has the nomination stolen from him?
Picture it for a moment. At the convention, procedural trickery is used to deny Trump the nomination. It is given to someone else- someone he ran against and beat or someone who didn’t even run. Chaos erupts. Trump commands a megaphone bigger than anyone else right now. He’s going to just accept this and move on?
Trump would go absolutely nuclear on the Republican party and the nominee.
Ahh, you say, but what if Trump decides he doesn’t really want to be President and drops out before the convention? Still no good. Who do they pick? How does that person get a serious general election campaign up and running in three months? How do they answer questions about their legitimacy as a nominee? How do they deal with the fact that Trump, even in this scenario, will absolutely be running to the media every chance he gets to talk about what a great campaign he would be running if he didn’t have to look after his business or whatever excuse he used to get out. He would be an incredibly destructive undermining force combined with an unelected and unprepared nominee.
If Trump continues to implode, what you’re ACTUALLY going to see is more and more Republicans taking the Mark Kirk path and “unendorsing” him. They will run from him. The Republican Party will cede the White House in order to maintain an obstruction force in the Senate. They’ll look to 2018 and 2020 when they can run against Hillary without the Trump stigma in order to control redistricting in as many states around the country as possible. They are not going to blow up their entire party, risk riots at their convention, only to choose a different candidate who would still be incredibly weak and unlikely to win.
It isn’t going to happen. Trump will be the Republican nominee for President.