National Review Online | Ramesh Ponnuru | Who Caused Trump?

National Review Online | Print | Ramesh Ponnuru | Who Caused Trump?

"Along with the party's donors, most Republican officials moved in the blink of an eye from thinking that it was unnecessary to act against Trump because it was too early in the primaries to thinking it was futile to act against him because it was too late. A lot of anti-Trump commentary at the start of the race proceeded from the assumption that such an obviously flawed nominee would be unacceptable to the party. But the party's leaders gave its voters no signal that Trump was unacceptable.

"Some of them did worse. Some anti-Trump conservatives have been angry at Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus for urging Republicans to back Trump. But that's the chairman's job; if he can't say that in good conscience about the party's presidential nominee, he should resign. What he didn't have to do was get all the presidential candidates to take a pledge to support the nominee. That pledge was not intended to help Trump, but rather to make it harder for him to run as a third-party candidate if he lost. Its effect was to handicap Trump's rivals, since the strongest arguments against him concern his unfitness for office. The RNC also did what it could to make the primaries more friendly to front-runners; these efforts, too, ended up helping a candidate it didn't expect.

"The media, from the start of the campaign, gave Trump far more coverage than any of the other candidates. (Actually, the media did that from before the start, since they had already made him a celebrity.) He has been good for ratings. But it's the conservative end of the media, from Fox News to many radio talk-show hosts, that really helped him. They did more than give him a hearing: They made endless excuses for him, and they ignored stories that might hurt him."