You could sense how the BBC, Channel 4 News, The Guardian and the rest of the British liberal media creamed themselves last week as leading figures from the Republican establishment lined up to slam Donald Trump. For a moment the liberal media forgot that folks like Mitt Romney and John Mccain were evil right wingers, in their book anyway, and lauded them as great statesman.
As one, the only question the media pack lead by Emily Maitlis on Newsnight and the beltway liberal warrior Kylie Morris on C4, asked was "have the big beasts left it too late". That was, of course, the wrong question.
In case the liberal media had forgotten, the country club Republicans they now view as big beasts but slated as evil no-hoper extremists when they were running for office, both got utterly thrashed when they ran for President. The sort of poll ratings that Trump has been getting are the sort of ratings that Mitt & John could only ever have dreamed about getting.
The Donald says some awfully daft things. But when he talks about NOT sending young working class men and women to die on foreign fields and when he talks about cutting taxes for middle class Americans not cosying up to Wall Street and big business he speaks like isolationist Republicans used to speak in the old days when it was a right wing party. Mitt & John with Wall Street/big business funded campaigns talked a different language and perhaps that is why millions of hard working, God fearing Americans from outside the rich enclaves on either coast are now coming back to the Republican Party having refused to back the Country Club patricians.
Lecturing such "ordinary" folks from the comfort of your Country Club or offices inside the beltway, about how The Donald is not their man was thus never going to have any effect. The question the liberal media should have asked as Mitt and John piped up was not "is it too late" but "why should anyone care what these losers think anyway?"
And the answer is that no-one outside the beltway classes and liberal media did care.
Ordinary voters in the primaries since the GOP establishment upped the smear Donald campaign have carried on voting for him anyway. The only poll rating that has changed is that of Marco Rubio who is the man that the GOP establishment all backed. With that endorsement he has tanked, finishing fourth in Michigan and a dismal third everywhere else.
When, and it is when not if, little Rubio is thrashed in his home state of Florida by Trump in a winner takes all Primary and when Trump also takes the winner takes all Ohio contest, Rubio will throw in the towel. But at that point The Donald will be so far ahead of the establishment's second pick, the relgious fruitcake Ted Cruz, that it will be game over.
At that point the GOP Establishment will have to decide if they back the man their party has voted for in a fair contest, that is to say Trump, or the frightful lying, criminal, war-mongering Clinton woman. Given what the endorsement of the GOP establishment has done for Rubio's poll ratings and did for those of Jeb Bush before him, should the "big beasts" betray their party and the Country and back the awful Mrs Clinton, one suspects that Trump won't be losing that much sleep over it.