Trump Is a Lemon, and Republicans Should Return Him

"Lemon laws are American state laws that provide a remedy for purchasers of cars and other consumer goods in order to compensate for products that repeatedly fail to meet standards of quality and performance," goes the Wikipedia definition. Republican delegates should study this carefully, as it may be their best option yet.

No product has ever failed to meet standards more comprehensively than has Trump, who, since he clinched the nomination in May, has malfunctioned in a manner more than spectacular and has been a gift beyond price to the opposite party. He has divided his party, disgusted the public, frightened the horses, and seems to be losing to Hillary Clinton. No lemon deserves this law more.

But, say Trump’s allies, he won fair and square (which he did) and the process deserves to be honored (it does), but in this case this argument puts the means (the primary process) ahead of the result or the end that this primary process was built to produce. That was a candidate who was broadly acceptable to most wings of the party, who could coalesce without stress its numerous factions, was a viable asset in down-ballot races, could hold his own in a national campaign and, hopefully, win. In most recent cycles, this worked fairly well; the candidate won (Bush) or lost by a safely non-wipeout margin (Dole, McCain, Romney) that left the party intact and set to rebound in the midterm elections.

In this instance, however, it failed. Trump hasn't united the party; he divides it on purpose. He has embarrassed and imperiled the candidates running for down-ticket offices, he trails Hillary Clinton in most polls taken, sometimes by a fairly wide margin. In other words, the much vaunted primary process has sold the Republican party a faulty appliance, which it ought to be allowed to recall.

Compounding this claim is the fact that much of this lamentable product malfunction has occurred once the deal was closed. Since the summer of 2015, people had been saying that Trump would sink sometime, and they were right, and he did. It was the misfortune of the Republican party that this took place after the voting had ended, so that the results of this continuing slippage could never show up at the polls. After he clinched, it was thought, he would clean up his act, clean up his language, give speeches in English, enlarge the big tent, and act like a candidate. Instead, it was at exactly that moment that he started to fall apart more. What came next was not healing, outreach, repose, and a focus on the obvious failings of Hillary Clinton, but Mexican judges, Stars not of David, fights with GOP officeholders too many to mention, and the numerous virtues of Saddam Hussein.