By Jonah Goldberg
Wednesday, August 10, 2016
Donald Trump has the GOP trapped in not one Catch-22, but
two. Call it a Catch-44.
The first Catch-22 has been the subject of widespread
conversation over the last few weeks. As GOP pollster Glen Bolger summed it up
for the New York Times: “Do we run
the risk of depressing our base by repudiating the guy? Or do we run the risk
of being tarred and feathered by independents for not repudiating him?”
“We’re damned if we do and damned if we don’t,” he added.
Lots of Republicans adore Trump — just consider the
enthusiasm at his massive rallies — and will turn on the establishment
Republicans who betray him.
But roughly one out of five Republicans do not support
the nominee. College-educated married white women — a major part of the GOP
demographic coalition — are abandoning him. Trump is behind by huge margins in
key swing states. His standing in the national polls is flirting with the
catastrophic.
It’s only early August and already Republican strategists
are speculating that down-ballot candidates will have to cut and run from the
nominee.
“If I were advising a candidate, and I used to do that
for a living, the first thing I’d tell them is: ‘Don’t put yourself in the
middle of other people’s races.’” Oklahoma representative Tom Cole said on
MSNBC.
That brings us to the second Catch-22. Republican
candidates at this stage have no excuses to offer if they decide to repudiate
Trump other than naked self-interest.
Let’s assume Trump cannot mount a comeback and becomes an
albatross for countless Republican candidates across the country. And let’s say
they jump ship. Then every Democrat in the country — not to mention almost
every pundit — will say, “You guys were fine with Trump as the nominee when he
was a racist, but now that he’s hurting the whole GOP’s chances, he’s suddenly
unacceptable?”
And there will be some truth to the accusation.
It’s instructive to look at what prompted the flop-sweat
panic of recent days. After leaving the Republican National Convention in
Cleveland, Trump climbed the rhetorical jackass tree and then hurled himself
earthward, hitting every branch on the way down.
There’s not enough space here to recount in any serious
detail all of the self-destructive statements and bizarre rabbit holes he
spelunked into — from attacking the parents of Captain Humayun Kahn, a soldier
who died serving our country, to “jokingly” inviting the Russians to muck about
in our elections, to reviving past controversies about Senator Ted Cruz’s
father’s alleged complicity in the Kennedy assassination.
And yet GOP establishment leaders stuck with their man —
just as they’d stuck with their man when he threw NATO under the bus, and
ridiculed our treaty obligations with Japan, and attacked American-born Judge
Gonzalo Curiel for an alleged conflict of interest between his professional
duties and his Mexican heritage. (Sure, House Speaker Paul Ryan and others
criticized Trump’s comments, but they did not officially distance themselves
from him.)
GOP leaders contemplated pulling the emergency brake on
the Trump Train only when the nominee said he wouldn’t endorse Ryan or senators
John McCain and Kelly Ayotte.
The message was clear: Only his willingness to endanger
top Republicans’ reelection was truly unacceptable behavior. Nothing else Trump
said or did until then was beyond the pale.
In fact, the message was so clear that even Trump heard
it. After an intervention his campaign denies took place, Trump grudgingly fell
in line, reading a statement endorsing Ryan, McCain, and Ayotte with all the
enthusiasm of an adolescent boy forced to apologize for shoplifting.
There are no good options left for the GOP. However its
leaders pivot to boost the party’s chances in November, they risk revealing
that winning is their only sacred principle — that is to say, admitting they
have no sacred principles at all.
Letting Trump Run Wild Exposes GOP’s Lack of Principles
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