As good as this piece is, it’s missing something critical. Profs. Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson have identified why the Republicans have managed to hit high-water marks in the states and in the House of Representatives during the same era in which they’ve done very poorly on the presidential level. What they don’t consider, however, is that the Republican Party has no necessary relationship to the Conservative Movement, nor does the balance of its fiscal, defense, and socially conservative factions have to remain constant.

Donald Trump can’t break the Grand Old Party, but he can reshuffle it. Whether he does or doesn’t, however, the Republicans are about to have a reckoning.

It’s true that the Republicans are fairly comfortable as an opposition party. Having spent most of the time since FDR’s election in 1933 in the congressional minority, they are suspicious of federal power, contemptuous of federal programs, and ill-suited for the job of running our federal agencies. They don’t want to lose presidential elections, but their higher priority is being able to obstruct the normal functioning of government rather than see to it that it runs smoothly.

For social conservatives, they want local control of schools and the right to discriminate. Fiscal conservatives want lower taxes and less intrusive regulations. Military hawks want money spent on military hardware, not school lunches and addiction recovery programs.

But things have been coming apart for a while now, and Donald Trump really has nothing to do with how the fissures have begun to open up within the Conservative Movement. While social conservatives want local control, what they want more than anything else is to control the courts, particularly with the long term goal of banning abortion. They cannot accomplish that if they keep losing presidential elections. Their concerns are the primary reason why the Senate Republicans will not capitulate on Scalia’s seat until after the ballots are cast in November. The party can’t afford to demoralize their Christian foot soldiers.

The business community wants lows taxes and lax regulations, but they also want our bills paid on time and they’d like to see substantial infrastructure spending. The bargain they made with the social conservatives doesn’t include defaulting on our debts and letting our bridges crumble. They also want free trade agreements and relatively liberal immigration policies. And they don’t want their corporate brands sullied by association with anti-gay or anti-Latino bigotry.

The hawks want nothing to do with the isolationists, and they know that foreign policy is ultimately set by the executive branch, so they’re the least complacent of all the conservative factions about their inability to win presidential elections.

These fissures have become so painful and so evident that they’re splintering the heretofore united front of conservative media. And this is probably more consequential that most people realize. Profs. Hacker and Pierson understand how geographical, demographic, and ideological sorting favors the Republican Party (allowing them, for example, to easily win the House in 2012 despite getting fewer votes). What they don’t consider is how key it is for the right to be able to speak to their constituents with one voice and one message. Nuance is the death of right-wing movements, and the Republican voter is getting inundated with nuance these days.

What appears to be dying is not the Republican Party, which, given enough time, could easily morph into either America’s socialist party or its National Front. It’s the Conservative Movement that is in real trouble, not the party they seized control of in the latter half of the 20th-Century.

It’s simply not true that the Republicans can hold together indefinitely under this kind of pressure. I believe the proof of this is what we’re all witnessing right now.

Can we blame Andrew Jackson for the fact that many states elect their judges or at least force them to occasionally win a retention vote to keep their jobs? If so, add it to the list of reasons why we shouldn't honor the seventh president.

We can't take the politics out of judicial appointments, but we can at least give judges some independence to issue unpopular decisions once they're on the court. The correct system is to appoint them for a set but lengthy term, and to only remove them for unethical behavior through the process of impeachment.

Constitutional principles and human rights are not always popular, especially when the masses are fearful. We need an independent judiciary, and elected judges are the dumbest goddamned thing I've ever heard of.

Nate Silver has a pretty good piece up that explains why Donald Trump still has some series obstacles to hurdle if he wants to be the Republicans' nominee. Almost everything he has to say could also be said about Bernie Sanders.

The two parties have different systems for awarding delegates, but most of these differences are fairly trivial. Both Trump and Sanders will probably need to rely on uncommitted delegates, most of which will be disinclined to support them.

In Trump's case, his increasingly erratic behavior could be the biggest problem, but his lack of conservative orthodoxy and his inferior organization are also speed bumps, and these latter problems are ones he shares with Sanders to one degree or another.

Silver says that Trump is probably screwed if he can't win on the first ballot, and I'm inclined to agree. I'd also say that Sanders is screwed if he needs to rely on superdelegates, which he will absolutely need to do. In a really best case scenario for Sanders where he pretty much runs the table of the remaining primaries and caucuses, he might manage to win the most pledged delegates, but he cannot win an outright majority of all the delegates. That's why he and his campaign are talking about swaying superdelegates who have already committed to Clinton to change their minds.

I think this is a hopeless strategy, and mostly for the same reasons that Trump can't hope to win on a second ballot.

The Sanders camp has adopted an adversarial posture toward the DNC and isn't raising money for the party or many of the party's officeholders. Clinton, meanwhile, is raising millions for both. Basic self-interest suggests that most superdelegates will prefer the candidate who is a team player and who brings in much needed money that will be used for organizing and advertising.

I don't think Sanders has aroused the same kind of antipathy as Trump, but he isn't doing the things he should do considering that his only path to success is to win over the party establishment.

I understand that it's a difficult trick to run as an outsider and not alienate the insiders, but that's the exact challenge facing Sanders and he does not seem to have figured this out.

He should realize that his mission is to take control of the DNC, not win in spite of it.

The strangest thing about this is that Sanders knows that the only way he'll ever win the nomination is to win over the superdelegates. So, why doesn't he even pretend to make an argument that he'll be a better or even adequate provider?

This is just a casual observation, but I think Sen. Rand Paul is misdiagnosing the problem in several areas:

Paul, during a visit to Northern Kentucky Friday morning, said he will support whoever is the Republican nominee, even if it’s Donald Trump. He said it’s better than supporting Democrat Hillary Clinton.

Paul criticized Clinton’s comments she made while campaigning in Ohio that she will “put a lot of coal companies and coal miners out of business.” Those words will likely reverberate around the state in the next few months and could hurt Clinton.

“I think we never get the candidate we exactly want unless you’re the candidate,” Paul said. “Think about it from this perspective. I’m from Kentucky, and Hillary Clinton recently said she would put coal miners out of business, and she would put coal companies out of business.”

Paul ended the press conference after that and didn’t take followup questions.

People aren’t asking Rand Paul if he’ll endorse Donald Trump because they’d prefer to be the nominee themselves, and they aren’t really suggesting that they’d prefer Sen. Paul, either.

More than that, though, it really doesn’t matter who the next president is as far as the future of the coal industry is concerned. Eleven years ago, we had the same argument over tobacco farming. Mitch McConnell fought hard for the state’s tobacco farmers, getting them generous terms in the final settlement, but he didn’t think the tobacco industry could be saved and preserved.

If McConnell and Paul want to help coal miners, they’ll get serious about helping them achieve a similar transition away from an unhealthy industry. Maybe Clinton will help them out with that.

In one sense, I fear that Jeet Heer is correct. Once you open up Pandora’s Box, it’s not so easy to put its contents back in the container. This is a theme I’ve hit on repeatedly over the years, but it’s usually been in the context of breaking norms against torture and indefinite detention, or about lowering the standards for what credentials ought to be required in a would-be president or vice-president.

Some taboos should not be broken, and the Republicans have been breaking taboos left and right ever since they decided to impeach the president over a petty infidelity, or at least since hanging chads tripped up the 2000 recount in Florida.

There have been big things and small. It used to be that judges were vetted by the American Bar Association and a degree from Regent University wasn’t seen as a ticket to a high-level position of responsibility in our nation’s bureaucracy. It used to be that we didn’t start wars of choice that involved invading and occupying foreign countries based a tissue box full of lies. It used to be that White House press credentials weren’t given out to fake reporters writing under an alias who moonlight as male prostitutes.

The list is getting pretty long at this point. You don’t threaten the credit of the United States. You don’t shut down the government. You don’t filibuster every procedural move in the Senate. You don’t refuse to meet with a Supreme Court nominee.

And, yes, you don’t nominate someone like Sarah Palin or Donald Trump and then try to tell us that they’re well-qualified for the position. You don’t defend the crackpot things that they say, whether it’s about torturing people, nuking people, beating the shit out of people, or deporting them by the millions.

Once you break these kind of taboos, the standards fall away and we’re no longer a credible defender of human rights and nuclear non-proliferation, or a beacon of freedom and sanctuary from strife. The standards we had for what constitutes a qualified judge or elected official fall by the wayside. Even our norms against open professions of racism wither on the vine.

Still, I’m not sure that Heer is fully justified in his pessimism here:

We can expect future Republican presidential candidates, running in a party that has not only lastingly alienated Americans of color but threatened them with open hatred and violence—even expulsion—to borrow from Trump’s strategy of racial polarization. Trump might fail, in other words, but Trumpism will live on. And given the fact America has a two-party system and voters will inevitably want change, we have to face the prospect that even if Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders wins the White House for Democrats in November, the historical odds say the United States will eventually elect a Trumpian president.

Yet Trump’s enduring impact won’t merely be political. “This is a movement,” Trump exulted last August during a campaign speech in Nashville, Tennessee. “I don’t want it to be about me.” He was right about that: Trump may be the icon of the movement he’s ignited, but it’s gone far beyond his actions or control. And while organized white nationalists are the animating core of the movement, beyond them are the far more numerous Americans who harbor racist attitudes and economic resentments but have no links to the likes of David Duke.

For decades, this cohort has had to grapple with the fact that public expressions of racism were becoming taboo. When politicians tried to win over these voters, they had to use code words and dog whistles. Trump has changed all that: The dog whistle has given way to the air horn. And now when white people want to harass Hispanic basketball players or Muslim students, they have a rallying cry: “Trump, Trump, Trump!”

This is a real concern, but it’s not inevitable.

Maybe because we have a two-party system, this future can be averted.

If Trump loses, and loses badly, I’m not sure that future Republican presidential candidates will want to emulate him. There might still be a window where a candidate can hope to win by racially polarizing the electorate and getting enough of just the white voters to win. But that window is closing if it is not already closed. If Trump can’t do it in 2016, it will take even more polarization to pull off in 2020. And it’s frankly pretty hard to see how you could be more racially polarizing than Trump and still retain the white voters who are turned off by this kind of politics. It’s not just that the country is getting browner by the year. The young voters are getting less race-conscious every year, too.

To see a full repeat of Trumpism, people need to see some margin in it. That means for Trumpism to have much a future, it needs to succeed now.

Otherwise, the Republican Party will have to reckon with what Michael Gerson is talking about:

But the durability of Trump’s appeal creates a conundrum for many Republicans. For decades, some of us have argued that the liberal stereotype of Republicans as extreme, dim and intolerant is inaccurate and unfair. But here is a candidate for president who fully embodies the liberal stereotype of Republicans — who thinks this is the way a conservative should sound — and has found support from a committed plurality of the party.

If the worst enemies of conservatism were to construct a Frankenstein figure that represents the worst elements of right-wing politics, Donald Trump would be it. But it is Republicans who are giving him life. And the damage is already deep.

If this is the logical endpoint of the Conservative Movement, well, it seems like we’re reaching the end.

That’s my hope, anyway.

I really ought to go over to the dark side:

Many of [Andrés] Sepúlveda’s efforts were unsuccessful, but he has enough wins that he might be able to claim as much influence over the political direction of modern Latin America as anyone in the 21st century. “My job was to do actions of dirty war and psychological operations, black propaganda, rumors—the whole dark side of politics that nobody knows exists but everyone can see,” he says in Spanish, while sitting at a small plastic table in an outdoor courtyard deep within the heavily fortified offices of Colombia’s attorney general’s office. He’s serving 10 years in prison for charges including use of malicious software, conspiracy to commit crime, violation of personal data, and espionage, related to hacking during Colombia’s 2014 presidential election. He has agreed to tell his full story for the first time, hoping to convince the public that he’s rehabilitated—and gather support for a reduced sentence.

Usually, he says, he was on the payroll of Juan José Rendón, a Miami-based political consultant who’s been called the Karl Rove of Latin America.

Analysis doesn't pay, but ratfucking does.

There are some commenters here who do, but I clearly do not embrace lachesism.

I'm sane that way.

Thomas Toch, an education specialist at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy, has an interesting article in our March/April/May issue of the Washington Monthly on how the teachers’ unions and Tea Party teamed up to force a major change in the Obama administration’s education policy.

This culminated in the president signing the Every Student Succeeds Act while praising the bill for “empowering states and school districts to develop their own strategies for improvement.”

The piece takes a hard look at the successes and failures of No Child Left Behind, Common Core standards, and the associated efforts to lift standards, help failing schools and improve classroom instruction.

While acknowledging most of the frequent criticisms of the former policy regime, Toch sees the administration’s capitulation on standards as harmful:

But the new federal education law both gives local educators more day-to-day flexibility and liberates them from external expectations, a strategy that risks returning many students to second-class educational status. Rather than being a path toward a new paradigm in public education where all students are taught to high standards, it invites a capitulation to traditional race- and class-based educational expectations, half a century after the passage of federal civil rights laws and just as the nation is transitioning to a minority-majority school population.

When “local control” in education is looked at through the lens of what’s best for students rather than through the filter of adult agendas, it’s clear that we’re not going to get many of the nation’s students where they need to be without explicit expectations for higher standards in much of what schools do, and without the policy leverage needed to ensure that educators deliver on those expectations.

The ‘policy leverage’ part of that critique is worth considering because, according to Toch, “the new law makes it virtually impossible for the U.S. secretary of education to proscribe, enforce, or even incentivize rigorous academic expectations, quality tests, school performance standards, and the measurement of teacher performance—core improvement levers.”

Read the whole thing and tell me what you think.

When President Obama invited the congressional Republicans to Blair House to discuss his comprehensive health care reform bill on February 25th, 2010, he had a variety of motives. Despite passing the Affordable Care Act through the House on November 7th, and through the Senate on Christmas Eve, the bill had not gone through the conference process that reconciles House and Senate versions of a bill into one piece of legislation which must then be passed (again) by both houses to become a law. On January 19th, Scott Brown unexpectedly won a special election in Massachusetts to fill the seat of the recently deceased Sen. Edward Kennedy, and the Democrats lost the 60th vote they needed in the Senate to reconcile their bill with the House’s version.

At that point, the bill was truly endangered, and the only way to save it was to use a controversial parliamentary procedure that I won’t go into in detail here. Suffice to say that some Democrats were feeling skittish about it, particularly in the House, because the procedural move required the House to pass the Senate version of the bill with no changes. Meanwhile, the Republicans were hammering the president for breaking a campaign pledge to conduct the health reform negotiations publicly and transparently on C-SPAN.

So, the president asked the Republicans to Blair House and put the whole thing on C-SPAN and made a big show of inviting them to provide their input to improve the bill. Looming over the whole thing was the obvious threat that the Democrats would pass the bill as it was if no Republicans came forward who were willing to trade their support for inclusion of some of their ideas.

Now, the Blair House meeting was naked political theater, but it didn’t have to be. The Republicans had adopted a policy of opposition in principle, meaning that the details of the bill were irrelevant. If you doubt me, Mitch McConnell twice went on the record to prove that I am right.

Only a few weeks after the Blair House meeting, McConnell explained to the New York Times why the details of the bill never mattered:

“It was absolutely critical that everybody be together because if the proponents of the bill were able to say it was bipartisan, it tended to convey to the public that this is O.K., they must have figured it out.”

A year later, in early 2011, he told Joshua Green of the Atlantic:

“We worked very hard to keep our fingerprints off of these proposals. Because we thought—correctly, I think—that the only way the American people would know that a great debate was going on was if the measures were not bipartisan. When you hang the ‘bipartisan’ tag on something, the perception is that differences have been worked out, and there’s a broad agreement that that’s the way forward.”

This obstructive strategy wasn’t restricted to the health care bill. It was across the board. And historians will debate how long it took President Obama to figure out that he was dealing with adversaries of zero good faith. But the president wasn’t deluded into thinking the Blair House meeting would create some kind of breakthrough. It was strictly for optics and to sooth anxiety in his own caucuses.

The thing is, the unwillingness of the Republicans to negotiate was their decision.

Keep that in mind when reading Daniel Henninger’s piece in the Wall Street Journal.

Barack Obama will retire a happy man. He is now close to destroying his political enemies—the Republican Party, the American conservative movement and the public-policy legacy of Ronald Reagan.

Today, the last men standing amidst the debris of the Republican presidential competition are Donald Trump, a political independent who is using the Republican Party like an Uber car; Ted Cruz, who used the Republican Party as a footstool; and John Kasich, a remnant of the Reagan revolution, who is being told by Republicans to quit.

History may quibble, but this death-spiral began with Barack Obama’s health-care summit at Blair House on Feb. 25, 2010. For a day, Republicans gave detailed policy critiques of the proposed Affordable Care Act. When it was over, the Democrats, including Mr. Obama, said they had heard nothing new.

That meeting was the last good-faith event in the Obama presidency. Barack Obama killed politics in Washington that day because he had no use for it, and has said so many times.

I don’t know if Henninger believes a single word of what he wrote there, but none of what he wrote about the Blair House summit is true. There was nothing “good faith” about the summit on either side, although, as I’ve said, there was also nothing precluding the Republicans from engaging in the legislative process. The “detailed policy critiques” the Republicans supposedly supplied that day were talking points that ignored the analysis of the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office. Virtually nothing they said or predicted turned out to be true. And no Republican offered to support the bill if only some of their concerns were addressed.

Henninger has correctly recognized that the president has presided over the destruction of his political enemies, but his analysis of how and why this happened reflects his permanent residence in a giant bubble of epistemic closure where the only sound is the chords of the Mighty Right-Wing Wurlitzer that plays all day long, every day.

For example:

After Mr. Obama won in 2008, Democrats controlled the Senate and House with large majorities. Normally, a party out of power is disabled but not destroyed by the presidency’s advantages. Democrats, when out of power, historically remain intact until the wheel turns again. Their ideology has been simple: tax and spend.

The minority Republicans began well. In 2010, ObamaCare passed with zero Republican Senate votes, and Dodd-Frank with only one Republican Senate vote. It was a remarkable display of party discipline.

Whatever you want to say about the ideology that drove Democrats to support the Affordable Care Act, it ought to be generously recognized that providing people access to health care was the priority, not taxing or spending to provide that access. As for the Republican opposition to the Dodd-Frank bill (and the American Recovery Act), this was more than a remarkable display of party discipline. It was an appalling display of refusal to take any responsibility for running the global economy into the Great Recession. When Dick Cheney justified Bush’s giant tax cuts by saying that Ronald Reagan had proven that budget deficits don’t matter, there was barely a peep of objection from conservative Republicans, but once Obama needed spending to save the economy, they suddenly thought the deficit was the biggest problem facing the country. They did nothing as the housing bubble inflated, pumped up by toxic under-regulated financial products and mortgage lending standards, and they bemoaned the bailout of failing colossal banks, but they couldn’t be bothered to support legislation designed to prevent a repeat of those mistakes.

For Henninger, this performance amounted to the Republicans “starting well” at the beginning of the Obama presidency.

In his opinion, things didn’t begin to go wrong until after Obama was reelected, and:

The right began demanding that congressional Republicans conduct ritualistic suicide raids on the Obama presidency. The MSM would have depicted these as hapless defeats by presidential veto, but some wanted the catharsis of constant public losses—on principle.

By early 2015, when the primary season began, virtually all issues inside the Republican Party had been reframed as proof of betrayal—either of conservative principle or of “the middle class.” Trade is a jobs sellout. Immigration reform is amnesty.

With his Cheshire Cat grin, Barack Obama faded into the background and let the conservatives’ civil war rip. For Republicans, every grievance, slight or loss became a scab to be picked, day after day.

In time, the attacks on “the establishment” and “donor class” became indiscriminate, ostracizing good people in the party and inside the conservative movement. The anti-establishment offensive created a frenzy faction inside the Republican base. And of course, it produced Donald Trump.

The Trumpians and Cruzians, who of late have been knifing one another in a blind rage, say this is a rebirth. So was Rosemary’s baby.

Where’s the recognition that the overheated rhetoric of the first term led to the calls for ritualistic suicide missions in the second? And, let’s be honest. The Republicans didn’t wait until the second term to begin the suicide missions. According to a tally kept by the Washington Post, the Republicans had already voted to repeal all or part of Obamacare 33 times by Election Day in 2012.

Now, for my money, the key moment that set the Republicans on the course of destruction didn’t come at the Blair House of February 25th, 2010. It came at the Republican retreat in Baltimore on January 29th, 2010. That’s when the president responded to a question from Rep. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee about his health care bill:

The component parts of this thing are pretty similar to what Howard Baker, Bob Dole, and Tom Daschle proposed at the beginning of this debate last year.

Now, you may not agree with Bob Dole and Howard Baker, and, certainly you don’t agree with Tom Daschle on much, but that’s not a radical bunch. But if you were to listen to the debate and, frankly, how some of you went after this bill, you’d think that this thing was some Bolshevik plot. No, I mean, that’s how you guys — (applause) — that’s how you guys presented it.

And so I’m thinking to myself, well, how is it that a plan that is pretty centrist — no, look, I mean, I’m just saying, I know you guys disagree, but if you look at the facts of this bill, most independent observers would say this is actually what many Republicans — is similar to what many Republicans proposed to Bill Clinton when he was doing his debate on health care.

So all I’m saying is, we’ve got to close the gap a little bit between the rhetoric and the reality. I’m not suggesting that we’re going to agree on everything, whether it’s on health care or energy or what have you, but if the way these issues are being presented by the Republicans is that this is some wild-eyed plot to impose huge government in every aspect of our lives, what happens is you guys then don’t have a lot of room to negotiate with me.

I mean, the fact of the matter is, is that many of you, if you voted with the administration on something, are politically vulnerable in your own base, in your own party. You’ve given yourselves very little room to work in a bipartisan fashion because what you’ve been telling your constituents is, this guy is doing all kinds of crazy stuff that’s going to destroy America.

And I would just say that we have to think about tone. It’s not just on your side, by the way — it’s on our side, as well. This is part of what’s happened in our politics, where we demonize the other side so much that when it comes to actually getting things done, it becomes tough to do.

The Republicans should have listened to the president’s advice.

They thought they’d get more short-term bang for the buck by encouraging the Tea Party and the Birthers (including Trump). And they did.

And now their long-term reward is “Barack Obama will retire a happy man. He is now close to destroying his political enemies—the Republican Party, the American conservative movement and the public-policy legacy of Ronald Reagan.”

I forget if I brought this up in a post or just in a comment, but it's something I've speculated about in the recent past:

“Some of the country’s best-known corporations are nervously grappling with what role they should play at the Republican National Convention, given the likely nomination of Donald J. Trump, whose divisive candidacy has alienated many women, African-Americans and Hispanics.”

“An array of activist groups is organizing a campaign to pressure the companies to refuse to sponsor the gathering, which many of the corporations have done for both the Republican and Democratic parties for decades. The pressure is emerging as some businesses and trade groups are already privately debating whether to scale back their participation.”

It's not going to happen, but if Bernie Sanders won the nomination of the Democratic Party it would be interesting to see how he would handle the corporate sponsorship of the convention. Instead of corporations opting out, as may happen on the Republican side, maybe Sanders would ask his army of supporters to chip in so he could tear down all the corporate logos?

When it comes to a classic narcissist like Donald Trump, it’s hard to say when (or if) he’ll begin to find the process of running for president so humiliating that he’s tempted to just drop out. He clearly doesn’t care that “respectable” people are routinely calling him a racist and comparing him to some of the most notorious fascist dictators of the 20th-Century. He doesn’t seem to care that the intelligentsia and the media elite are condemning his character and his intelligence. But he’s also obsessed with his image and he’s financially dependent on his brand. His campaign has already cost him business relationships and partnerships, yet that hasn’t tamed or dissuaded him so far.

But, let’s remember what happened to H. Ross Perot, who you might recall dropped out of the race in July 1992 only to reenter it in early October:

Like Trump, Perot was allergic to spending money: he believed that paid advertising was unnecessary as long as he could get on TV as often as he wished. For a time, it worked: He got away with many slip-ups, gaffes and misdeeds because they reinforced his outsider persona. Perot was adept at using the public’s disdain of the news media to deflect criticism. Repeatedly deemed a nut-bag by the press, Perot adopted an appropriate campaign song: the Patsy Cline tune, “Crazy.”

But Perot came to despise the scrutiny brought on by all the free media he sought, and he never truly embraced retail politics to the degree needed to win. Just as Trump has drawn criticism for phoning in his cable-news appearances from his bedroom, Perot preferred to campaign from his Dallas office rather than make personal appearances. And ultimately, his skin proved too thin for the race: When he withdrew in mid-July, he gave various official explanations for the decision. But the one his advisers gave to the New York Times was telling: “[C]ampaign insiders described Mr. Perot as a man obsessed with his image who began to lose interest in the contest when faced with a barrage of critical news reports.” Even when Perot dove back into the race in the fall, he was a busted candidate: in the final five weeks, he left Dallas only for debates and a handful of rallies. After his 1992 loss, Perot’s image never really recovered, and after one more flailing presidential run in 1996, he disappeared from the public eye almost entirely.

Trump’s already getting a little squirrelly. He’s under pressure after his campaign manager was indicted yesterday for battering a Breitbart reporter, and now he’s reneging on his pledge to support the eventual nominee because he feels the RNC has treated him shabbily and he can sense that the party elite are plotting to deny him the nomination at the convention. There’s increasing talk that he could cost the Republicans control of the House of Representatives as well as the Senate.

Due to sore loser laws in many states that will prevent Trump from running as an independent after failing to secure the Republican nomination, he cannot run a successful third party candidacy. But he could get on the ballot in some red states, split the vote, and hand Electoral College delegates to Clinton or Sanders. I can see him doing that out of spite.

If he does secure the nomination, I could even see him losing interest like Perot did briefly if he thinks he’s just getting abused, his image is being irreparably harmed, and that he’ll go down in history as a major loser.

He’s very unpredictable. He seems to be getting enough validation at the moment to make all the hits he’s taking seem worthwhile, but this doesn’t seem to make much sense from a business or branding perspective, and he surely knows that history is written by the same intellectuals who increasingly despise him with the heat of a thousand suns.

And reading what the former Communications Director of the Make America Great Again Super PAC, Stephanie Cegielski, had to say yesterday, it seems like Trump may be like the dog who actually caught the car.

Almost a year ago, recruited for my public relations and public policy expertise, I sat in Trump Tower being told that the goal was to get The Donald to poll in double digits and come in second in delegate count. That was it.

The Trump camp would have been satisfied to see him polling at 12% and taking second place to a candidate who might hold 50%. His candidacy was a protest candidacy…

…I don’t think even Trump thought he would get this far. And I don’t even know that he wanted to, which is perhaps the scariest prospect of all.

He certainly was never prepared or equipped to go all the way to the White House, but his ego has now taken over the driver’s seat, and nothing else matters…

…What was once Trump’s desire to rank second place to send a message to America and to increase his power as a businessman has nightmarishly morphed into a charade that is poised to do irreparable damage to this country if we do not stop this campaign in its tracks.

I’ll say it again: Trump never intended to be the candidate. But his pride is too out of control to stop him now.

You can give Trump the biggest gift possible if you are a Trump supporter: stop supporting him.

He doesn’t want the White House. He just wants to be able to say that he could have run the White House. He’s achieved that already and then some. If there is any question, take it from someone who was recruited to help the candidate succeed, and initially very much wanted him to do so.

I don’t know if Ms. Cegielski is correct about what Trump originally intended or if it even matters anymore what he set out to do in the beginning. But, maybe she’s right and he’s looking for an offramp. Maybe winning the nomination and then losing to Clinton or Sanders would be his worst nightmare.

Who can say what goes on in his mind?

All I know is that this won’t end well for him and he’s got to know that.

So, does he pull the plug before Cleveland? Does he flake out after Cleveland?

Or is he in it all the way to the end?

And, if so, what terrifies him more?

The humiliation of losing?

Or the responsibility of winning?

The governor of Wisconsin can serve for as many terms as he wants, provided he can keep getting reelected, of course. Back in January, around the time that he delivered the annual State of the State address, Scott Walker sent out a fundraising email that said, in part, “Our re-election campaign may seem like a long way off, but the other side is already gearing up for a bruising battle.”

Not everyone took this threat to run for a third-term very seriously:

The missive was aimed at helping retire more than $1 million in debt his federal campaign had amassed before he abandoned his run for president in September.

Assembly Minority Leader Peter Barca (D-Kenosha) said he wasn’t buying it, noting Walker’s low approval ratings as measured in polls by Marquette University Law School. He said Walker is simply trying to avoid being seen as a lame duck.

Obviously, Walker’s presidential campaign fizzled so badly that it died in the crib long before a single voter went to an Iowa caucus. He had taken a lot of criticism for ignoring the needs of the state. Yet, precisely because his presidential ambitions hadn’t amounted to anything, he suddenly lacked any obvious political future unless he ran for reelection. And the idea isn’t all that far-fetched. Tommy Thompson served as Wisconsin’s governor for 14 years and 28 days between 1987 and 2001.

Remember, too, that Walker cited the need for the party to unite around an opponent to Trump as one of his reasons for dropping out early. That’s something that Trump remembers, and it’s becoming an issue now as the Republicans get ready to vote in the Wisconsin primary.

“I’m all in” for Cruz, Walker said Tuesday.

“I really beat (him) up badly and he walked out frankly in disgrace,” Trump said of Walker’s exit from the presidential race. “I’m surprised he’s got any juice left in Wisconsin.”

Trump might be surprised about Walker’s remaining strength in the Badger State, but according to Marquette University Law School’s 2016 polling, 84% of Republicans still have a positive view of the governor.

And that’s something that is going to really get put to the test in the primary, because Trump is running against Walker’s record as governor. He’s running aggressively against his record:

Trump is trying to win the Wisconsin primary while repudiating his party’s most influential figures here. He bragged Tuesday about crushing Walker’s presidential bid. He accused him of sowing discord and starving the schools because he refused to raise taxes.

Wisconsin has problems, Trump said in Janesville, but “you have a governor that has you convinced that it doesn’t have problems.”

Trump also said that Wisconsin “is doing very poorly,” and is “losing jobs all over the place.”

On that last point, the truth is relative.

A review of those federal data showed that Wisconsin’s unemployment rate is at its lowest point since 2001 and that the state now has more than 2.9 million jobs, a figure it last reached in late 2007. But Wisconsin’s job growth during Walker’s tenure has lagged the national average and the fortunes of neighboring states.

The Democrats (and Trump) focus on the fact that Wisconsin has lagged behind the national average and neighboring states like Minnesota, but Republicans focus on the positive trends. The local GOP is not happy to hear Trump echoing Democratic talking points, and they aren’t pleased that their presidential frontrunner is calling them a disaster for refusing to raise taxes and wanting to take away people’s entitlements:

Calling in to a Rockford, Ill., radio station Tuesday morning, Trump said [Paul] Ryan was a “a really nice guy,” but “Paul wants to knock out Social Security, knock it down, way down, wants to knock Medicare way down … you’re going to lose the election if you do that.”

Said Trump: “I want to keep it. These people have been making their payments their whole lives … but they want to really cut it and they want to cut it very substantially, the Republicans. And I’m not going to do that.”

This all raises the stakes in Wisconsin considerably. If Trump can come in there and trash the governor, trash the Speaker of the House, and basically trash Republican orthodoxy on taxes and entitlements, and come away with a win?

Needless to say, the whole Wisconsin establishment is arrayed against Trump, including their formidable phalanx of suburban talk radio hosts. As I said above, the governor does still enjoy a very healthy approval number among Republican voters. If they can’t stop Trump, that will be a pretty strong indictment and a major show of weakness.

Even if they succeed in stopping Trump in the primary, unless he is prevented from being the nominee, it’s going to be hard for them to unite behind their candidate in the general election.

If Ted Cruz somehow gets the nomination, Walker will have a future in his administration. Otherwise, he’ll have to run for reelection or start shopping for a private sector job.

Yeah, I’d say that the stakes have gotten very high.

Competitive primaries help voter registration and particularly party registration (in states where you have to register with a party to vote).