By Greg Sargent
Wednesday, August 03, 2016
Republicans are in a full scale panic today because
Donald Trump’s candidacy appears to be in chaos. There is talk of an
“intervention,” inspired in part by Trump’s continuing attacks on the Khan
family. RNC chair Reince Priebus is described as “very frustrated” and
“stressed,” because he is “running out of excuses” to offer party bigwigs about
Trump’s political incompetence and indifference to basic political norms.
Republicans are panicking because Trump is frittering away a chance to defeat
Hillary Clinton amid “self inflicted mistakes” and “missed opportunities.”
In other words, if only Trump were not acting in such a
crazy manner right now, he’d be on track to having a real shot to beat Clinton,
and if Trump just gets a handle on his fleeting bout of bad behavior, he’ll be
right back in the position of having a good chance to win. An “intervention”
just might set that right.
But let’s entertain another interpretation of what’s
going on here. Republicans have shifted into a much higher state of Red Alert
because Trump’s erratic antics are revealing just how reckless their decision to nominate him really
was, and how reckless their continued support for him really is. In other
words, Trump is now threatening to damage the party in far worse ways than
Republicans had bargained for, because he’s revealing in inescapably clear
terms the real character and qualifications of the person they knowingly nominated to run the country and continue to support
for the presidency.
This quote from Newt Gingrich to the Post is extremely
revealing:
“The current race is which of these
two is the more unacceptable, because right now neither of them is acceptable,”
Gingrich said in a Wednesday morning telephone interview. “Trump is helping her
to win by proving he is more unacceptable than she is.”
Gingrich said Trump has only a
matter of weeks to reverse course. “Anybody who is horrified by Hillary should
hope that Trump will take a deep breath and learn some new skills,” he said.
“He cannot win the presidency operating the way he is now. She can’t be bad
enough to elect him if he’s determined to make this many mistakes.”
In this telling, Hillary Clinton is beatable because she
is “unacceptable,” and all Trump has to do is be a little less “unacceptable.” You widely hear various versions of
this argument. The premise: Clinton is so widely despised that a majority of
Americans will leap at the chance to support Trump if he merely acts like a
minimally acceptable alternative. Trump’s behavior right now is compromising that.
But this elides the many deeper weaknesses that bedevil
Trump’s candidacy. There is no question that Trump’s current follies are likely
very damaging. But Trump has long harbored a range of traits and qualifications
— or lack thereof — that already
render him a very compromised candidate, both in a political sense and in the
sense that Republicans should not have nominated him because he is a unique
menace to the American experiment.
Trump’s pathologically abusive tendencies, his
hair-trigger overreaction to criticism and slights both real and imagined, and
his mental habit of sorting the world into the strong and the weak — the
dominant and the submissive — render him temperamentally unfit for the
presidency. He lacks basic knowledge of the world and doesn’t appear burdened
by any curiosity about the complexities of foreign affairs or domestic policy.
He is at worst a genuine bigot and at best a charlatan who has actively sought
to stoke reactionary hostility to culturally and demographically evolving
America. He is indifferent to the inner workings of the American system and
instead promises authoritarian glory.
Trump’s basic vision of the country as an apocalyptic
hellscape — in which we’re existentially threatened by skyrocketing crime, dark
hordes flooding up from the south, and refugee-terrorists menacing us from the
east — is based on exaggerations, distortions, and lies. His policy agenda to
“fix” things is pure fraudulence. He promised mass deportations that will never
happen and would be hideously cruel if he could actually carry them out. He
proposed a religious test for entry into the United States — a temporary ban on
Muslims entering the country — and then modified that proposal to include a
suspension of immigration “from any nation that has been compromised by
terrorism,” which is even more absurd. As Ari Melber reports today, experts say
his proposal would essentially destroy our immigration system.
Trump speaks to legitimate grievances on the part of blue
collar workers in the industrial heartland, but he promises to bring jobs
roaring back by bullying CEOs who talk about outsourcing jobs, and with trade
wars that would do more harm to the economy than good. He promises to preserve
entitlements and offhandedly vows to double Hillary Clinton’s infrastructure
spending, which is wonderful, except he won’t say how he’d pay for this stuff,
even as his tax plan would cost $10 trillion in revenues over ten years, making
all of it even more implausible.
All of this renders Trump politically compromised as a candidate. His depiction of the
country is pitched squarely at blue collar whites and is rejected by college
educated whites and other voter groups, all of whom continue to be alienated by
his worldview and persona. Majorities reject Trump’s promised mass deportations
and ban on Muslims. While Trump could still always win, all of this is badly
hampering his ability to broaden his appeal, casting doubt on the notion that
he can prevail simply by being slightly less unacceptable than Clinton.
Beyond this, though, the key point here is that many of
the Republicans backing him probably would not quarrel with much of what I’ve
said about Trump’s qualifications and agenda. They might be inclined to agree
with him on taxes. They have dabbled in the same sort of budgetary hocus pocus
and border demagoguery that Trump has. And they do think the 11 million should
remain subject to removal. But they agree that proactive mass deportations and
the temporary ban on Muslims are basically crazy. Many of them have condemned
Trumpism’s xenophobic and authoritarian appeals and many very likely agree that
Trump is temperamentally unfit to wield even a fraction of the powers of the
presidency. Many of them have adopted a posture in which they say they support
him as the nominee but seem to be calculating that he will lose. Along the way,
they’re hoping he’ll remain just respectable enough not to reveal just how
reckless it was that they nominated him for the presidency.
What’s really happened in recent days is that Trump’s
ongoing battle with the Khan family only made all of these traits — the
unhinged response to criticism, the bigoted attacks on Muslims, the naked
abusiveness directed at a grieving family — more glaringly obvious. By
extension, this has made nominating this man even more impossible politically
for Republicans to defend. But Republicans knew who they were nominating. They
themselves had repeatedly acknowledged that his personal traits were alarming
and had castigated many of his positions as cruel and at odds with fundamental
American values. Voices from all across the political spectrum, from liberals
to centrists to Never Trump conservatives, warned that he would only get worse.
Now Republicans
want to stage an intervention?
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