It Was Once Easy For Liberals to Root for Trump to Blow Up the GOP. Not Anymore.

The article hits the nail on the head. While I'm not a liberal, I had enjoyed watching the spectacle that is Trump. For me it was about the Republican Party finally taking a hard look into the mirror asking themselves how they could have enabled such a man to become so popular within their party. I was hopeful that this would start a much needed era of reformation within the GOP to rediscover their roots (I also believe the Democrats need to undergo a similar process). Unfortunately this is not what happened, instead the establishment GOP continues to see Trump as an anomaly while a considerable section of their voter base continues to join the Trump bandwagon. In fact the hardest look in the mirror Trump has inspired has been done by his critics like myself. Before Trump I always thought the bigoted, extremist side of America was just a very small minority, but the fact that he has enough of that support to be by far the leading republican nominee has blown that notion out of the water. And that's been the most eye opening part about Trump's run because even if he loses, the people that support him are still gonna be here. So no matter the result, going forward, Americans as a whole will still have to reconcile with the fact that a large segment of our population holds views that we long thought had gone extinct. Those flaws in our society still exist.

"Try to imagine a Trump presidency the day after a major, 9/11-like terrorist attack. There is simply no telling what the man would or could do. He has already threatened to go after his enemies if elected, promising a sort of Nixon-but-worse approach to governance. In the event of terrorism, how far would he go to curb civil liberties? What insane foreign policy idea would he dream up and pursue? Sure, George W. Bush curtailed civil liberties and invaded Iraq. But that’s the point. Trump is a more hateful person than Bush and threatens to be even less bound by democratic checks and balances than Bush was.

Even without an attack, Trump could move the United States closer to what Fareed Zakaria has called an “illiberal democracy,” a country with regular elections but little regard for the people or the institutions of state, which the leadership can ignore at will. (The current list of countries with illiberal elected leaders stretches from Russia to Turkey to India.) Recent American history has not featured a candidate who, if victorious, could fundamentally alter the country’s character in such a way."

Capt Walter Miller we will need to wait and see how the votes go to in tomorrows primaries. While it is possible that Donald Trump may win sufficient delegates to be nominated I doubt that would cause the GOP to implode. If Bernie sanders wins the democratic nomination the same would hold true. However if Lyndon LaRouche ever did that would be the doom of the democrat party :-)