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The Washington Post
Trump will
lose, or I will eat this column
By Dana Milbank
October 2
I never expected to write these words, but I miss Mitt Romney.
On Wednesday, the day the front-runner for the 2016 Republican
presidential nomination was in New Hampshire alleging that Syrian
refugees fleeing for their lives may actually be clandestine
terrorists, the 2012 Republican presidential nominee was in Washington,
talking sense.
Dana Milbank writes about political theater in the nation’s capital. He
joined the Post as a political reporter in 2000. View Archive
“Donald Trump will not be the nominee,” Romney told a group of
business-school students at Georgetown University. And why won’t Trump,
who, when he isn’t besmirching Syrian refugees as terrorists, is
maligning Mexican immigrants as rapists, get the nod? Because, Romney
said, “when all is said and done, the American people usually do the
right thing.”
The Post’s Philip Rucker recorded Romney’s categorical prediction, and
his rationale. “I know there’s some skunks in any endeavor — business,
politics — and they get most of the visibility, but there are also some
really good people,” Romney said. “The American people are a very good
people and by and large find people of similar character to elect to
the highest office in the land.”
Romney is right. In fact, I’m so certain Trump won’t win the nomination
that I’ll eat my words if he does. Literally: The day Trump clinches
the nomination I will eat the page on which this column is printed in
Sunday’s Post. I have this confidence for the same reason Romney does:
Americans are better than Trump.
The Post’s media reporter, Paul Farhi, took me to task this week for
expressing such a sentiment. I was one of the pundits he named as being
“consistently wrong” in predicting Trump’s demise, one who “declared
his candidacy dead or mortally wounded” while Trump instead “maintained
his leading position in opinion polls.”
Specifically, Farhi took issue with my Sept. 20 column, after the
second Republican debate, when I asked: “Could this be the beginning of
the end of Donald Trump?” I expressed the hope that “Trump will indeed
succeed in making America great again — by motivating Americans, even
fellow conservatives and Republicans, to repudiate his nonsense.” The
media reporter refuted my belief that Trump would fail by pointing to a
new USA Today poll showing that Trump had gained six points since July.
Alas for Farhi, the Post’s Philip Bump posted a piece 57 minutes
earlier undermining the Trump-triumphant theme. Bump noted that Trump
has shed eight points in polling averages from his peak before the
second debate and that “there are signs that Trump is hitting the
ceiling of his support” at 23 percent.
More to the point, my prediction that Trump will ultimately fail isn’t
about punditry or polling. It comes from faith that American voters are
more sensible than many poll-obsessed journalists and commentators give
them credit for. Trump (and Muslim-baiting Ben Carson) won’t prevail in
the Republican primary because voters, in the end, tend to get it
right...
Read the rest of the article at the Washington Post
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