Trumpmania rises, Republicans panic

WASHINGTON: Donald Trump will not have the Republican nomination on a platter. Top Republicans have finally woken up after the real estate mogul’s Super Tuesday success, and they are plotting to thwart him by backing his opponents, airing attack ads, and if all else fails, engineering a “brokered” or contested convention aimed at foiling his nomination.
The party leadership is wheeling out the big guns.Former Presidential candidate Mitt Romney said in a stinging speech on Thursday that Donald Trump’s nomination as the Republican presidential candidate would “greatly diminish” prospects for a safe and prosperous future for the US. Romney said the other Republican candidates would be better alternatives to the billionaire businessman, whom he called “a phony, a fraud”. “The only serious policy proposals that deal with the broad range of national challenges we confront today come from Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and John Kasich,” Romney said of Trump’s rivals. “One of these men should be our nominee.”
The coming days will see more such smack-downs of the frontrunner, including ads in states that will hold party primaries over the next two weeks. It will culminate in a showdown on March 15 in the Florida primaries, where the party will back the establishment favourite and son of the state Marco Rubio in an effort to impede Trump (who leads the polls there).
The establishment is also bringing out its intellectual big guns. On Wednesday, some 50 members of the Republican national security community, including neo-cons such as former US ambassador to India Robert Blackwill, and state department veterans Philip Zelikow and Robert Zoellick, released a letter trashing Trump and asserting that “his vision of American influence and power in the world is wildly inconsistent and unmoored in principle,” and could diminish US standing in the world.
But veteran GOP strategists are saying efforts to derail Trump are “too little, too late” after the establishment stood by and did nothing as he stormed the party. “Donald Trump whipped the establishment and it is too late for the limp GOP establishment to ask their mommy to step in and rewrite the rules because they were humiliated for their impotence,” one backroom operative was quoted telling party hacks in an email. Others warned against trying to pull the mat from under him at the party convention, which is usually a wildly celebratory party the nominee who wins the primary fair and square.
(With input from agencies)