Informative. In that case, I think Christie goes into the category of candidates who could win the general election but couldn't win the primary. I hadn't thought about it, but yeah the bridge controversy probably means that the Republican establishment would never choose him over, say, Bush.
I don't know how many times I have to keep saying this, but the only people who can beat Hillary Clinton in an election are those who can survive being grilled the most. She plays dirty, and Trump has more skeletons in and out of his closet than anyone else running.
No matter who the Republican candidate is, they are going to get grilled. On the contrary, I think Trump would fare better than anyone when it comes to this kind of pressure. First of all, he thrives off it. But more importantly the media can't push Hillary's rhetoric and completely ignore or marginalize Trump's rebuttals because Trump is so interesting. In other words, I think Trump is the only Republican candidate who couldn't get railroaded, and that's Hillary's only reliable winning strategy because even Democrats don't trust her very much. (According to
this study, 51% of voters mistrust Hillary, 51% of voters mistrust Trump.)
Someone being wealthy has never meant that they can't be bought. Trump in particular exists only to be bought.
The point is that Trump isn't currently bought and sold while everyone else is. I don't know what you mean by that second part. What makes Trump exist
only to be bought? And say that were the case, how does that make Trump worse than any of the other candidates who are currently taking campaign bribes?
The Republicans weren't damaged at all by this. They lost in the 90s because Clinton successfully triangulated them on this issue. He was as up there with the prayer breakfasts and pew visits as anybody. He even got the likes of Pat Robertson to speak against throwing him out of office.
I disagree. In my area, the stereotypical Republican is a fundamentalist Christian who wants theocratic moral law, even though there haven't been any successful candidates like that for a long time. Reputation matters. // In Bill Clinton's days, the religious right was respected, not ridiculed, by the mainstream. Of course, all the effective politicians got in on that. But the Democrats didn't "triangulate the issue", because if that were the case once mainstream opinion of the religious right turned the Democrats would have been the ones stuck with this weird reputation, not the Republicans. (I think this is less an issue for the Republicans than it was a decade ago, but I still think it's an issue.)
Rest assured, you don't need to hope on wether you're wrong.
So you think Trump can win the Republican Primary?
I want to make it clear, when I say the Democrats have the media as their mouthpiece, I don't think of it as an exclusively Democratic thing. Like 20 years ago the Republicans had the media as their mouthpiece and would railroad detractors by suggesting they were immoral people who didn't respect god or something, in the same way the Democrats now have the media as their mouthpiece and railroad detractors by suggesting they are racists who abuse women or something today. The media did suggest Trump was a racist and a sexist for the first couple of months, and the fact it did not shut him down immediately suggests to me the Democratic hold on the media is already breaking down. Within the next decade it will probably decisively switch back over to the Republicans and they'll railroad detractors with something new, maybe suggesting the person is against technology / the American way of life and wants the country to become an Islam-esque non-culturally-integrated warring tribal state, or something topical like that.
