How to Defeat Donald Trump's Unconventional War

Trump has a 17 point lead in South Carolina despite sounding like Michael Moore in the last debate. If these numbers hold (which against my better judgment, I continue to stubbornly believe will not) and he decisively wins South Carolina, he becomes the clear favorite to win the nomination. That’s because he has a 20 point lead in Nevada and the anti-Trump bloc remains tragically divided.

Until now, his rivals have fought a gentlemanly war against Trump, replete with polite “he’s not a conservative” and “he doesn’t even know what the Nuclear Triad is” lines of attack.

In a conventional presidential race, a candidate who is exposed for not knowing what the nuclear triad is, is instantly eliminated from contention. In fact, I don’t recall the last time a presidential candidate survived such an egregious blunder. Ted Kennedy’s campaign was famously sunk in 1980 because he couldn’t articulate why he wanted to be president. In 1988, Michael Dukakis was panned for showing a lack of emotion when asked to consider a gruesome hypothetical scenario challenging his opposition to the death penalty. These were standard political blunders, not holy shit these guys are woefully uninformed about basic issues.

Trump is able to survive previously thought to be unsurvivable blunders because he is not running a conventional campaign.      

   

Trump is Genghis Kahn. Maybe not as brilliant of a tactician, but bold, fearless, ruthless, and above all, disdainful of convention. You cannot defeat a Genghis Kahn or an Alexander the Great or a Caesar utilizing knightly virtues. You have to counter their ruthlessness with ruthlessness. It doesn’t mean you compromise your values, either. It means you recognize what (political) warfare is.  

Are Republicans willing to allow a pseudo-conservative populist to win the nomination because they’re rigidly committed to fighting a conventional, “knightly” war?   

During the Battle of the Bulge, the Germans in futile desperation executed in cold blood dozens of US troops in Malmedy, Belgium. They did it because their dwindling supplies and insurmountable logistical disadvantages prohibited them from taking POWs.

The massacre served as a rallying cry for US troops, who from that moment on dispensed with conventional rules of warfare and basically, to put it delicately, went ape shit on the Nazis. Most reputable ethicists agree that the ensuing “war crimes” against the Germans were morally justified given what had just transpired and the nature of the enemy they faced.   

Fighting a fanatical enemy using conventional means spells disaster.

Time is running out for the GOP.

The Republicans’ predicament is akin to the Seinfeld episode when Jerry refuses to thank an acquaintance for giving him hockey tickets the day after the game because he’s fed up with gratuitous thanking. Offended, the acquaintance doesn’t offer him tickets to the next game. Kramer implores Jerry to call and thank him. Unable to penetrate Jerry’s obstinacy, the exasperated Kramer calls Jerry a “stubborn, stupid, silly man” and storms out.

The GOP is Jerry: refusing to break convention despite overwhelming evidence that failure to do so means not getting those coveted hockey tickets. Or something like that.

If Trump wins South Carolina, the GOP will have to either fundamentally alter its strategy or face the tragic fate virtually all conventional armies overrun by revolutionary commanders face: embarrassing and total defeat.