The Republican Party is "in the middle of an existential crisis" because Donald Trump is the presumptive presidential nominee, author Norman Ornstein told
Newsmax TV on Tuesday.
"Donald Trump, if he were elected, would define the Republican Party in his own terms," the American Enterprise Institute scholar told "The Hard Line" host Ed Berliner. "Those would not be terms that would be pleasing to consistent conservatives — but at the same time some of the issues that he's raising, the role of big money in politics, that's bringing out average voters."
Further, the developer is "taking policy positions that seem to either change every day or he just makes things up along the way," Ornstein said.
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"But he's clearly not running as a consistent conservative — and that's going to confound and frustrate an awful lot of people."
But Democrat Hillary Clinton isn't the most stellar candidate, either.
"There's also little doubt that we have two nominees — and they're both presumptive nominees with extremely high unfavorable ratings," Ornstein told Berliner.
"Trump's higher than Clinton's, but it's fairly clear from what we've seen in the last couple of days that he's going to run a campaign that's built around not so much reducing his own unfavorables but increasing hers — which will probably not make anybody very happy."
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