Trump and Bernie: Where have the ‘outsiders’ gone?

After Monday night the outsider narratives pushed by the Sanders and Trump campaigns during the primaries have finally both fizzled out into establishment coziness.

After months of railing against their respective party establishments, both populists have now started working together with those same establishments in order to forge something resembling party unity going into the election.

After thanking the bare minority of his supporters in attendance, Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-V.T.), made it very clear that it’s time for everyone to get in line behind the presumptive Democrat nominee.

“Let me be as clear as I can be. This election is not about, and has never been about, Hillary Clinton, or Donald Trump, or Bernie Sanders or any of the other candidates who sought the presidency,” the former Democratic candidate at the party’s national convention in Philadelphia Monday night.

“This election is about which candidate understands the real problems facing this country and has offered real solutions … By these measures, any objective observer will conclude that – based on her ideas and her leadership – Hillary Clinton must become the next president of the United States.”

At a convention that already looks more divided than the RNC could have ever appeared on national television, the Democrat elite are already running around with their hair on fire in order to keep calm among a still-tremendously fractured base.

The protests are already bigger in Philadelphia than in Cleveland, and a few days after her cheeky tweet to RNC Chair Reince Priebus, DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz was booted from party leadership position after a slew of emails from inside the DNC revealed, among several other things, an internal plot to sink the Sanders campaign, despite the façade of neutrality that the party tried to put up for months.

But it doesn’t look like the Clinton Sanders rift is going to heal up that quickly, at least on the convention floor, as Sanders’ endorsement seemed to be the first mention of the former Secretary of State that didn’t draw an audible mix of boos and cheers.

At several points during the night, the mention of the presumptive nominee and her selected running mate drew loud, sustained boos from Sanders supporters throughout the program. During Sen. Cory Booker’s (D-N.J.) speech, Bernie supporters chanted “war hawk, and they also shouted “we trusted you” and eventually erupted into long, sustained boos at Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) after she endorsed Clinton onstage.

Bernie even tried to quell his still-devout followers on Monday afternoon. Against the chants of protestors saying “we want Bernie,” the senator raised his hand in the air and said to the crowd, “brothers and sisters, this is, this is the real world that we live in.”

“Trump is a danger for the future of our country and must be defeated … And I intend to do everything that I can to see that he is defeated.”

On the GOP side, unity seems more of a demand than an appeal. The past two weeks in Cleveland put Donald Trump’s current collusion with the Republican establishment on full display as well. As evidenced by everything from the combined whipping efforts on the rules committee that eventually ensured that there would be no roll call vote and that the RNC would retain its current level of authority over the grassroots, or having whips tell delegates to boo Ted Cruz onstage, the New York real estate developer’s outsider narrative from the Republican party now seems like a distant memory from the primary election.

In this context, Ted Cruz is the only “outsider” candidate from the primary season who can still claim a scrap of street cred at this point in the cycle. By refusing to endorse Donald Trump in Cleveland last week and encouraging voters to vote their conscience, the Texas Senator managed to earn the respect of grassroots conservatives and those conscionably incapable of supporting the Republican nominee, as well as the seemingly unforgiving ire of those demanding party unity solely for the sake of beating Hillary Clinton.

And the backlash for the Texas Senator is still rolling out days after his Wednesday speech. In addition to short term damage to his image in the polls among Republicans, he’s now having to deal with allegations against his father on an even grander scale than before.

Donald Trump doubled and tripled down on his comments about the Senator’s father two days after the conscience speech, and even the RNC Chair Priebus and DNC communications director Luis Miranda have gotten in on the fun, both, in some way, defending Trump’s speculation on the subject.

And now even some of Cruz’s donors are distancing themselves in light of the convention speech.

The establishment strikes back, hard; stay in line, or else.

But this is the realm of party politics, where yesterday’s outsider is tomorrow’s company man, yesterday’s insurgency is tomorrow’s game of “rally ‘round the candidate,” and the establishment duopoly still reigns supreme. (For more from the author of “Trump and Bernie: Where have the ‘outsiders’ gone?” please click HERE)

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