“I am not in any way a Trump supporter. I prefer Kasich, Rubio, Fiorina. But somebody has to break the grip of the Club for Growth.”
— David Frum, noted conservative, former speechwriter for President George W. Bush and now a senior editor for The Atlantic
David Frum’s comment, posted on Twitter, put me in mind of certain compelling aspects of Donald Trump’s scintillating populist incursion into the establishment boardroom command centers of the Republican Party.
I refer in the specific Arkansas context to the bankrolling by the industrial Koch brothers and the big-moneyed Club for Growth of the cynical menace that is Tom Cotton.
The Kochs and the Club for Growth bought Cotton’s way into the U.S. Senate on the relative cheap and with relative ease, considering that Arkansas is a small, inexpensive and largely uninformed and thus pliable state.
Now, all of a sudden, the Koch brothers and the Club for Growth can’t do a darned thing on the larger national scale with or to this real estate blowhard named Trump.
The Kochs excluded Trump from their swank candidate retreat and said unflattering things about him. The Club for Growth has put out statements that Trump is a dangerous liberal. It has solicited special donations to attack Trump on television.
Trump offends the traditional business right wing by saying hedge-fund bandits need to pay higher taxes. He offends the traditional religious right wing by saying Planned Parenthood does some good things, abortion not one of them.
He offends the traditional military right wing by saying the Iran nuclear deal is horrible but that it’s impractical to contend that the next president could simply undo it.
A contract is a contract, he explains, and investors who buy businesses typically inherit bad contracts and make the best of them.
Despite all that, Trump holds steady at 25 percent to 30 percent in the GOP presidential primary polls. He does it by connecting with regular folks who adore that he has his own money, can’t be corralled and says freewheeling things they may or may not agree with, but don’t much care.
Meantime, the Kochs’ national puppets, Scott Walker and Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush, all agents of the Republican orthodoxy to cut taxes on the rich and free businesses from regulation, languish in the single digits.
It was so much easier in Arkansas with Cotton.
Young Tom had shown up on the big-money establishment’s radar with his resume of Harvard Law study, Army service in Iraq and Afghanistan, and a public letter wanting The New York Times prosecuted for revealing American intelligence practices and secrets.
Seizing the opportunity of Barack Obama’s immense unpopularity in southern Arkansas and Mike Ross’ decision not to seek re-election, Cotton declared in 2012 for Congress from the 4th District. His early financing came in bundles of checks sent by members of the Club for Growth, which, by the way, makes the half-right argument that Mike Huckabee is a dangerous liberal.
Quickly seizing the further opportunity of Arkansas’ mad dash to anti-Obama Republicanism, Cotton ran instantly for the U.S. Senate in 2014.
During the campaign, he blew off the Pink Tomato Festival in Warren to attend a Koch retreat at a posh California resort.
He had to deflect criticism of such actions in his brief House tenure as voting as the Club for Growth told him against an appropriation to help the Arkansas Children’s Hospital.
Cotton was overwhelmingly elected to the Senate and to a fast track for the presidency, perhaps as early as 2020, depending on the outcome in 2016.
But now those plans are … well, they’re still in effect, and credible, and offensive, and frightful, except that now Trump rides in with his anti-immigrant outsiderism and populism and uncontrolled blowhardism.
For the moment, Trump roars like a bull through the china cabinets of the Kochs’ and the Club for Growth’s elegant boardrooms.
What Trump may have done — and the verdict is yet to be delivered — is reveal that the tea party types who fueled the frenzied conservative insurgency since 2010 weren’t doctrinaire business conservatives, or doctrinaire religious conservatives, or doctrinaire military conservatives.
They may simply have been persons highly peeved and interested in blowing up government, figuratively.
Initially they wanted to blow up the Democratic government. But now it appears that many are gravitating to Trump with the intent of blowing up the John Boehner-Mitch McConnell government as well.
Meantime, if you are an Arkansas voter who favors Cotton and Trump — and I know you’re out there — please take pride in that you represent the great Arkansas tradition of making no political sense whatsoever.
John Brummett’s column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at [email protected]. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.