The Trump takeover at 10: The president is a year into his second term but captured the GOP a decade ago |
A decade before he exercised force in Venezuela, sought the fall of Cuba, or fixed his eyes on Greenland, Donald Trump had his sights not on conquering nations but on toppling his rivals for the Republican nomination for president. Small stakes can have large ramifications.
To vanquish those seeking the 2016 GOP presidential nomination would not seem as lofty a goal as “running” a foreign country, as the president has said he intends to do with Venezuela, but in the fullness of time, we can see it as the first step toward a changed America: The boldness, or folly, of the second Trump administration’s current pursuit of hemispheric dominance would simply not have happened had the future president not first contended with Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Gov. John Kasich (R-OH) some 10 years ago.
Of course, with the benefit of hindsight, Trump’s ability to dispatch with that first slate of primary opponents seems both inevitable and somewhat comic in its very inevitability: a huge figure in modern times, for better and for worse, making quick work of candidates who would either be absorbed into his orbit, temporarily (former Texas Gov. Rick Perry) or more lastingly (Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL)), or disappear from the scene entirely. But at the time, such conclusions were not at all obvious to the cognoscenti, who preferred to regard Trump less as a threat to democracy than an irritant to decency.
For many observers, Trump’s gobbling up of American life — for some, a welcome merger, and for others, the most hostile of hostile takeovers — can be traced to the August 2015 GOP debate on Fox News. There, on live television, Trump appeared to evolve in real time from an amusingly immoderate New York real-estate developer and media personality to a profoundly politically incorrect presidential aspirant. On that night, Trump won some fans, or, at least, some cheers, for his comical singling out of Rosie O’Donnell in reply........