For the first time in my life, I feel just terrible for Lindsey Graham.
For the first time in my life, I feel just terrible for Lindsey Graham. Thinkstock

As contentious as this primary election season has been on the left, I certainly do not envy the GOP. While Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton and her lovable rival Bernie Sanders advocate for progressive policies and keep things relatively clean, the GOP faces the looming specter of a Trump nomination, a nomination many in the Republican party don't seem to want and increasingly can do little to prevent.

I mean, when there's talk of setting up a new Republican superPAC strategy AFTER Super Tuesday? You know it's bad. Poor Paul Ryan, is a thought I actually had this week. For the first time in my life, I feel just terrible for Lindsey Graham. These are Republican leaders whose politics I basically hold in contempt, but it must indeed be upsetting to have a profoundly naive, profoundly sure of himself would-be dictator running for your political party's top nomination.


One interesting outcome of GOP leaders' dissatisfaction with Trump is full of delicious irony: At least one top conservative has said he'd vote for Hillary Clinton over Trump, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and advisor to Marco Rubio's campaign, Max Boot. From an interview at Vox:

"I'm literally losing sleep over Donald Trump," Boot told me over the phone. "She would be vastly preferable to Trump."

He's hoping that he's not alone — even if it means splitting the party over a Trump nomination.

"I would hope that the party would fracture," he says, "if the nominee were a fascist demagogue like Donald Trump."

Boot's reaction speaks to just how anxious Republican elites are about Donald Trump — and how much of a threat he poses to the ideas that have been central to their worldview for decades, particularly on foreign policy.

Boot continues:

ZB: Is Trump really that bad, from the point of view of a conservative foreign policy thinker?

MB: I think that American power has diminished under Obama. But if Trump were to become president, we would look back on the Obama presidency as a golden age.

If you take seriously Donald Trump's crackpot proposals, if they were implemented, it would leave America impoverished and isolated. He would actually be far more dangerous than that: He has plainly shown that he does not have either the intellect or the character to be commander in chief.

I'm frankly terrified at the notion that somebody as bigoted and ignorant as Donald Trump could possibly wind up in command of the most powerful military force in the world.

Donald Trump does not have a serious foreign policy thought in his head. He has no ideas, he only has impulses — and those impulses change every 30 seconds.

He loves dictators. He praises Putin, he loved the Tiananmen Square crackdown, he praises Kim Jong-Un. He said Saddam Hussein was great because he killed terrorists, which is a hell of a way to characterize the hundreds of thousands of victims Saddam Hussein claimed.

This is a fascinatingly weird potential outcome if Trump wins the nomination. And it runs directly counter to a narrative that I've seen a lot of anti-Hillary critiques fall back on—the "people hate Hillary, only Bernie can defeat Trump" line, which I won't bother including in full here, since it'll certainly appear in the comments below, with fun links to US Uncut.

So anyway, if you're losing sleep over the sheer terror a Trump presidency presents, you're not alone. So is one of Marco Rubio's advisors.