#NeverTrump

I ranted a bit this morning about the #NeverTrump open letter than a group of GOP foreign policy types have published over at War on the Rocks. Main takeaways are this:

• Complaining about Trump is pretty goddamn rich, given how reprehensible GOP foreign policy advice has been over the past fifteen years or so. Many of the contributors to this letter are deeply implicated in the most incompetent and immoral foreign policy decisions of the Bush administration; describing Trump as some kind of unique danger is, in this context, absurd.
• There’s no effort among these folks to grapple with how the arguments they’ve made have laid the foundations for the Trump.  These are people who, by and large, have argued that vaguely coherent bluster is the best kind of foreign policy.  The central critique of the Obama administration from this quarter has been that he doesn’t do enough bluster; a “bluster gap” has opened that enables Putin to steal Crimea, etc.  Trump just drops the “vaguely coherent” part and keeps the bluster.
• There are components of Trump’s foreign policy ejaculations that are abjectly sane compared to what the Establishment GOP is just fine with.  Yglesias alerted me to this one this morning; how do you watch this and NOT conclude that Donald Trump is the most reasonable guy in the room?

More broadly, I’m of various minds regarding the future of the #nevertrump movement. I strongly believe that Trump is a weaker general election candidate that Rubio; Cruz might be a special case, but I think that even he would have less trouble drawing the disparate elements of the GOP together than Trump. But then, the quality of my prognostication skills is in deep question [ed- is Farley finally admitting that he was brutally, hopelessly wrong about Trump winning the nomination? Not yet!!!]. I also strongly concur with Scott that the practical difference between the evil done by a Trump presidency and a Rubio presidency is small-too-non-existent; this is one reason the Establishment types dislike Trump so much.

I think that it will be fun to watch as many of the #nevertrump folks determine that Hillary. Has. Just. Gone. Too. Far. after some milquetoast statement of policy and decide that they need to vote for Trump after all. At the same time, I think it will be extremely difficult for people like Rubio, Bush, and Romney to walk back what they’ve been saying about Trump in time for the general. What Marco has said so far, and what Mitt is apparently primed to say this afternoon, should provide nice fodder for a long series of attack ads against Trump.