Davis Merritt: Stop Trump? But who will bell the cat?

Donald Trump has not received a single vote and has zero delegates to the Republican National Convention, so time remains to head off what theoretically could be a candidate disaster for the GOP and a governing disaster for America. But that’s a lot less time than the nation had in August when his bizarre presidential campaign took wings out of a huge, raucous rally in Mobile, Ala.

Almost from the beginning, Trump has been leading the crowd of Republican candidates, with 30-or-so percent of Republicans telling surveyors that they favor him. However, there’s a realistic flip side to that seeming dominance: More than 66 percent of voters surveyed prefer someone else. If the surveys are an accurate reflection of all Republican voters, as they should be, that’s hardly a landslide once people start marking ballots and lining up in caucuses in February.

The persistence of Trump’s reckless, bullying, superficial, no-apologies, often truth-free campaign has mainline Republicans terrified. To most of them, a candidate as radical as Trump would surely result in the loss of another presidential race (see Barry Goldwater and George McGovern) and likely the loss of the Senate.

But even those who recognize that Trump is unqualified by temperament, experience and intellectual capacity and maturity are apparently afraid to mount a frontal attack on him.

It’s a modern take on Aesop’s fable that asks, “but who will bell the cat?” The mice could not execute their grand plan of defense because each feared being gobbled before the warning bell could be hung around the cat’s neck. GOP insiders know that the price of a stop-Trump effort would be an ugly public feud in which Trump would insult, ridicule and bully them every day, making the party look even more inept and riven.

And, of course, the plan could backfire. So far, poll data shows that Trump’s one-third support is heavily canted toward white working-class men, two-thirds of whom lack college degrees and half of whom make less than $75,000 a year – the demographic with the deepest fears of immigration, economic stress and political emasculation. A cohesive Washington insider attack on Trump could recruit even more disaffected people to his anti-Washington camp.

Even the National Republican Senatorial Committee is hedging its bets by preparing a seven-page strategy for use by Senate candidates should Trump actually be the nominee. The Washington Post reported last week that the confidential memo “urges candidates to adopt many of Trump’s tactics, issues and approaches – right down to adjusting the way they dress and how they use Twitter.”

But if traditional Republicans are chilled by the image of squads of ambitious Trump doppelgangers swarming across the land, there’s possibly an even worse scenario for them on the far, far horizon: Trump not getting the nomination and vengefully setting off on a well-financed third-party campaign.

You can ask Al Gore about that. By most calculations, Ralph Nader’s quixotic 2000 campaign sent George W. Bush to the White House, because Nader siphoned away 97,421 Florida votes and Gore lost that decisive state to Bush by only 537. Trump could siphon millions.

Donald Trump has not received a single vote and has zero delegates to the Republican National Convention, so time remains….

This story was originally published December 7, 2015 at 6:01 PM with the headline "Davis Merritt: Stop Trump? But who will bell the cat?."