Jack Lessenberry and Nolan Finley
"I sympathize" with Republican fantasies of keeping Donald Trump from taking "their party down to a cataclysmic defeat," longtime Michigan politics analyst Jack Lessenberry says on Michigan Radio.
But in real life, the staunch Democrat adds, "thinking the party can or should deny Trump the nomination at this point is absolutely crazy."
His blunt commentary airs the day after a Detroit News editorial headlined "Dump Trump," written or shaped by Nolan Finley, the paper's opinion editor since 2000. Republicans should "change their party rules before convention deliberations start to free delegates from allegiance to the results of state primaries and caucuses," says Sunday's call for "preserving their party."
That'd be risky business, Lessenberry feels.
He's a past News politics writer and globe-trotting correspondent who knows Finley and discussed Trump with him on a WDIV talk show last August. Lessenberry doesn't call out his former colleague by name on public radio, but quotes briefly from the editorial and notes that his "editorial page has long been something of the conscience of the Michigan Republican Party."
Here's more from Monday's broadcast:
Regardless of what kind of candidate or president you think he might be, Trump was his party’s voters’ clear choice. Denying him what he rightfully won would be a travesty.
Not to mention something that doesn’t seem to occur to the stop Trump crowd: What do you suppose Donald Trump will do if he feels he has been cheated out of a nomination that is rightfully his?
Every indication is that he would launch an independent, kamikaze bid whose first priority would be to wreck the GOP – and which would be virtually certain to give Democrats control of both houses of Congress and who knows how many state legislatures.
Republicans may well want to consider what they need to do to avoid a similar nominee four years from now, but Trump played by their rules, and he won.
When Finley and Lessenberry were Devin Scillian's studio guests last summer on "Flashpoint," The News' lead editorial writer said Trump was just savoring the spotlight and doesn't really want to be president.
"Democrats have had a celebrity candidate from the beginning, now Republicans have a celebrity candidate," Finley said last Aug. 2, according to WDIV's online summary.
The Detroit's News' editorial June 26 brings a broadcast commentary the next day by a former News politics writer.
