When I was growing up...

...and the manager of a losing baseball team -- even if he was a good one -- got fired, my dad used to say something like, "You can't fire the whole team." And he was right: the best manager in the league can't play without players.*

I thought of this when reading "Why Trump Supporters Are Angry — and Loyal," by Elizabeth Williamson in the Times this morning. The author cites two conservatives in particular who are disparaging Donald Trump's voters.

The first, Erick Erickson (all emphasis mine):

...calls Trump supporters “Branch Trumpidians,” and appears to spend much of his time retweeting insults of them. Last week Mr. Erickson wrote that the only people who love Mr. Trump “are white supremacists, neo-Nazis, a white victim class of mostly blue-collar workers, a group of white folks who have failed at life and blame everyone else for their own bad decisions.”

The second, Kevin Williamson, a correspondent for National Review, which has endorsed Mr. Cruz (and who seems to me a male version of Ann Coulter -- someone desperately seeking attention by saying outrageous things):

...wrote last month that it is “immoral” and “a lie” to say “that the white working class that finds itself attracted to Trump has been victimized by outside forces. It hasn’t.” Mr. Williamson wrote that these voters have no one to blame for their distress but themselves, and certainly not the Republican establishment.

The fight to keep the nomination from Mr. Trump now moves to his home state of New York, whose primary is April 19. Kraig Moss, a Trump supporter, lives in Owego, a town in what Mr. Williamson called “hardscrabble white upstate New York” where “the white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles.”

Ouch!

I'm also reminded of a question my British friend, Jamie, has asked me from time to time, "I get why the one percent in America vote Republican; but why would anyone else?"

And it's a good question (and one for another post). But my point here is that it seems like some Republicans who don't like Trump want to fire the whole team instead of the manager. 

It makes me want to say to them, Psst: Be careful. Those Trump voters are your party's base. If you fire them you won't have anyone left but the donor class. 

* That's Billy Martin, above, who, with Jimmie Dykes, holds the modern-day record for most MLB teams managed, five.