The Hightower Report

Exciting news, people! The Republican Party's establishment has a secret plan to stop its blue-collar voters from supporting Donnie Trump. Their plan is code-named: "Operation Paul Ryan."

Good grief – the GOP's old-line clique of congressional bulls, corporate funders, lobbyists, and right-wing think tanks is as confused as goats on AstroTurf when it comes to grasping a core part of Trump's appeal. He's reaching out to longtime Republican voters who've finally realized that it's the party's own Wall Street elites who knocked them down economically and the party's insider cadre of K Street influence peddlers who've shut them out politically.

The party powers are insisting that the Donald is winning only because he's drawing voters who're ignorant, racist, xenophobic, and misogynist. In fact, he's drawing huge numbers of disaffected Republicans who're mainly anti the party's own power-players. Far from being Koch-headed, laissez-faire ideologues – these voters like Trump's opposition to job-busting trade scams, his mocking of big-money campaign donations, his call to hike taxes on Wall Street's pampered hedge-funders, his support for Social Security, etc.

For these voters, "Operation Paul Ryan" is a dud, a farce ... and an insult. Rep. Ryan has long been the kept-darling of the Wall Street/K Street crowd. The obtuse establishment snootily calls him "serious" presidential material – only because he champions such plutocratic policies as privatizing Social Security, cutting taxes on the superrich, deregulating Wall Street, and turning Medicare into a voucher system. The only thing serious about Ryan's agenda is that it's a dead-serious loser with the great majority of Americans.

Trying to knock off Trump for Ryan is a sign of the GOP's irreversible decline into cluelessness and political irrelevance.