Establishment Plotting to Attack Trump

NYT has the skinny:

Quiet conversations have begun in recent weeks among some of the Republican Party’s biggest donors and normally competing factions, all aimed at a single question: How can we stop Donald Trump?

Republican strategists and donors have assembled focus groups to test negative messages about Mr. Trump. They have amassed dossiers on his previous support for universal health care and higher taxes. They have even discussed the creation of a “super PAC” to convince conservatives that Mr. Trump is not one of them.

But the mammoth big-money network assembled by Republicans in recent years is torn about how best to defuse the threat Mr. Trump holds for their party, and haunted by the worry that any concerted attack will backfire...

So far, according to the Campaign Media Analysis Group and a Republican media buyer, there has barely been any advertising targeting Mr. Trump. Out of $90 million worth of ads reserved or bought in the Republican primary, just $1,300 has been spent attacking Mr. Trump — an ad in Spanish that ran briefly in California that was sponsored by a Spanish-language television network.

The Club for Growth, which has spent millions of dollars on feisty intraparty campaigns attacking Republican candidates who deviate from conservative economic orthodoxy, appears closest to moving against Mr. Trump, soliciting advice from among its members and researching potential lines of attack. The group helped torpedo the populist presidential bid of Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor, in 2008, and has long been a thorn in the side of Republican leaders — making it, many Republicans believe, a credible foil to Mr. Trump.

But the club’s president, David McIntosh, said his group was still grappling with how to handle the protean Mr. Trump, whose appeal is based less on policy positions than on tapping into the raw anger of Republican voters against Washington leaders. Mr. McIntosh said some members had even told him they agreed with Mr. Trump’s critique of Washington’s ineffectual establishment even if they did not regard him as very principled.

“Part of our research has been why would a conservative Republican voter find this appealing,” Mr. McIntosh said. “A wonkish explanation that trade is actually good for the country probably won’t assuage them.”..

Andy Sabin, a New York supporter of Jeb Bush, said the question of what to do about Mr. Trump had come up repeatedly on the Hamptons fund-raising circuit this summer, as what seemed like a summer romance by disenchanted conservatives blossomed into a full-blown insurgency.

“He’s been a topic, and he obviously disgusts a lot of people, because he’s been vile,” said Mr. Sabin, who is also a donor to American Crossroads, the party’s leading super PAC. “But he’s also been able to bring out what people feel about their government.”

The cost of an anti-Trump campaign would be daunting: Reshaping opinions about Mr. Trump, a candidate with universal name recognition and a knack for garnering free airtime and column inches, could cost as much as $20 million. A sustained campaign aimed at Fox News viewers could cost $2 million a week, one Republican consultant working for a rival candidate estimated, while a more targeted effort, aimed at Iowa caucus-goers later this fall, would require as much as $10 million.