On “Wait, Wait Don’t Tell Me: The Weekly News Quiz,” after a brief summary of the latest Trump atrocities, the panelists chime in.
Mo Rocca: “I feel bad for Lincoln. He’s got to be thinking, ‘I went brought so much for this?’”
Paula Poundstone responds: “I feel bad for Nixon.”
This is comedy, but the Trump phenomenon is no joke. The sane wing of the Republican Party is beside itself. The putative presidential nominee of the party says if they won’t help him win, they should just shut-up. He’ll handles everything himself.
That’s what they’re afraid of. So far, 70% of women view Trump unfavorably and almost half say they would never vote for him. His unfavorable tally among blacks is 94% and for Hispanics is 89%. But he is still hanging in there with white men without a college education.
His alleged party is not in his corner either. Former Republican presidents and presidential nominees oppose him, as do Republican pundits from David Brooks to Erick Erickson to Peggy Noonan. She wickedly likens him to the corrupt scrap metal magnate, bully and blowhard played by Broderick Crawford in “Born Yesterday.”
Many present GOP officeholders are between a Scylla and Charybdis. Run away from Trump and his zealots won’t vote for you. Run with him and everybody else may run away from you. Brooks calls this a McCarthy moment. Those who get in bed with Trump will never be allowed to forget the misadventure or be able to exterminate the fleas.
Even Republicans with safe seats are appalled by a candidate who alienates great swaths of the electorate, shows no willingness to work with other members of the party, and embraces positions anathema to party orthodoxy such as an end to free trade and a turn to neo-isolationism.
Some Republicans have had panic attacks about President Obama’s allegedly unconstitutional usurpations of power by using executive orders to get around GOP legislative roadblocks. But at least Obama, a law professor, has read the document. Trump seems to believe he can tear it up. If he doesn’t like the opinions or ethnicity of a judge, he should be able to replace him. If he doesn’t like treaties ratified by Congress, he ought to be able to heave them overboard.
Trump is the first Jersey Shore, Reality TV, talk radio, tweet-addicted candidate for president, a cross between Archie Bunker and Howard Stern. His record of accomplishments includes multiple trophy wives with the cheesecake photos to prove it, a string of strategic bankruptcies, a history of refusing to pay his bills, and a penchant for nuisance lawsuits. He has been willing to slander anyone while boasting of his own intelligence, toughness and genitalia. Yet he appears to gather his views of the world from checkout-line tabloids and internet conspiracy theorists.
The party of Lincoln is clearly reeling with disbelief at the funny thing that has happened to it on the way to 2016. A year ago the GOP was boasting that it had the strongest field in years and that Hillary was so flawed that the election would end in a landslide and total dominance for the party – executive, legislative and judicial.
Instead, like some comic book supervillain, Trump came out of nowhere and knocked over The Fantastic Sixteen like so many bowling pins. The Party exulted that, after eight years of ruination at the hands of the alien Obama, they would take back the country to the good old days of Reagan’s supply side, trickle-down, Iran-Contra paradise. Instead, Trump stole Reagan’s slogan and appears poised to take the country back to the good old days of Nixon and McCarthy.
Except that, too late to pick a more plausible standard bearer to oppose Hillary, Trump’s excesses seem to be catching up with him. First, he launched an ethnic smear at a judge in order to win a court case involving his fraudulent “university.” Then he reacted to the Orlando tragedy with tone-deaf braggadocio, misinformation, and something that looked more like paranoid delusions than coolness under fire. His polls promptly began to plummet so that he now trails Hillary by 12 points.
Republicans have begun to b believe not just that he will sink their dream of recapturing the presidency but drag Senate and House candidates under with him. How could this be happening to them? It should have been so easy to run the table after eight years of demonizing Obama and Hillary.
But the chickens have come home to roost. The Republican base – values voters, evangelicals, libertarians, blue-collar white men – has finally noticed that after giving the party their votes for 30 years they are worse off than ever.
While their wages stagnated, while they lost their homes or jobs, and while their kids couldn’t afford to attend college or repay their loans if they did, the Republicans had done nothing to help them. They repaid their loyalty with tax breaks for wealthy donors who helped rig the economy against them, passed trade deals that did the same, sent their sons to foreign wars on false pretenses, and let minorities, immigrants and gay people have equal rights. Yet every two years the party still expected their votes.
The tea party was a warning that base voters were fed up with being taken for granted. This time, they rejected the same old shell game from Bush, Rubio, Christie, Perry. Fiorina, Kasick, Graham, Jindal, et al. They even turned their backs on candidates calculated to appeal to the ranks of evangelicals – Cruz and Carson. Astonishingly, Trump’s strongest support comes from the religious right, though his personal history and patent unfamiliarity with scripture ought to make them bilious.
Payback is a bitch. One might almost feel sorry for the GOP. But, in the words of the murderesses from “Chicago,” “They had it comin’.”