Romney: Trump is a Fraud

Mitt Romney has released an advance copy of what he will say in Utah today:

"Donald Trump is a phony, a fraud.  He's playing the American public for suckers."

Every candidate I watched up close relied on magic and unicorns and pixie dust for their policies to make sense.  

The first piece of magic is slight of hand.   As I wrote yesterday, the Republican coalition attempts to hold together groups whose economic interest are very different.  The orthodox establishment coalition links financial elites seeking free trade, financial and business deregulation, lower labor protection, and lower marginal taxes with the mass of voters whose economic interests are confounded by those policies but who are pulled into the coalition with discussion of abortion, guns, traditional white Christian identity politics.  

Cruz Website:  Cruz will "abolish the IRS".  Simple!

The second piece of magic is levitation, doing the impossible.  All Republican candidates promise tax cuts for everyone.  Republican orthodoxy requires tax cuts for everyone.  But so is balancing the budget.  And so is increasing the military.   And so is paying down the debt.   Simultaneously.  And that is the magical thinking in the middle of the core Republican argument: you can have it all, painlessly and without sacrifice.

Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders make their own argument in favor of a kinder, gentler, more generous country, with both sharing core planks of an improved America:
   ***less expensive or free higher education
   ***re-negotiate the interest rates on student loans
   ***more comprehensive access to health care for the poor
   ***comprehensive immigration reform
   ***greater regulation--or breakup--of financial firms
   ***more progressive taxation

Hillary: Enact immigration reform.  Simple!

Bernie and Hillary speak as if each of these policies had not been attempted and faced utter opposition and intransigence by Republican majorities or filibustering minorities.  This isn't complicated.  It isn't as though those ideas had not been thought of or proposed.   They were blocked.  Obama used up every bit of political capital and good will that he had in order to attempt a partial health care overhaul.  It cost him Democratic majorities in Congress, which have dug in so deeply that Obama cannot fill uncontroversial ambassador appointments, much less Supreme Court appointments.   Bernie and Hillary talk about the better world to come, not the trench warfare a Democratic president would face.

Bernie Sanders Website:  He will simply demand the wealthy pay their fair change.  Simple!

So the criticism of Donald Trump comes in the middle of an environment that is awash with magical thinking.   This helps Trump, because there is no candidate who presents as a candidate of practical realism, describing hard truths.   No one talks of blood, sweat, tears, and toil, and the audiences don't want to hear it anyway.   (I watched Lindsey Graham attempt to justify a bit of sacrifice as the cost of military safety, and he couldn't fill a conference room, much less a basketball arena.)  There is no market for hard truths so there is no candidate advancing it.   So Trump isn't either.

Trump had branded himself as the person who will cut through barriers.  Is it magical?  Sure.  Just like everyone else.   Trump is nudging the brand to call himself the "common sense conservative", a general election moderate, in contrast to the ideologically rigid conservative, Ted Cruz.    Trump isn't the fraud-candidate; he is the "common sense" candidate.

 So I do not expect Romney's charge that Trump is "a phony, a fraud" to hurt Trump because magical unrealism is the centerpiece of every candidate's story.  Trump is simply the common sense magician.