Donald Trump Personifies Today's GOP

While leading elected Republicans are belatedly criticizing Donald Trump for his proposal to bar all Muslims from entering America, none have as yet said they will oppose his candidacy should he frighteningly become the GOP nominee.  Moreover, most have been peddling a milder form of the same racism and religious based hatred that Trump has now raised as the main standard of the Republican Party.  Why?  Because years back the o-called GOP establishment cynically welcomed Christian extremists and white supremacists into the party.  Trump is merely the culmination of an agenda that has been in place for more than two decades or longer.  And driving the trend are the Christofascists who have turned the GOP into an extreme sectarian party.  These are people who embrace ignorance as a badge of honor, hate all who differ from themselves, and want a theocracy.  Trump is merely peddling what these nasty base of the GOP demands.  It is ugly  and it is frightening.  The New York Times slams it in its main editorial today.  Here are excerpts:

Go ahead, deplore Donald Trump. Despise his message. Reject his appeals to exclusion and hatred. But do not make the mistake of treating him as a solitary phenomenon, a singular celebrity narcissist who has somehow, all alone, brought his party and its politics to the brink of fascism.

He is the leading Republican candidate for president. He has been for months. The things he says are outrageous, by design, but they were not spawned, nor have they flourished, in isolation.

The Republican rivals rushing to distance themselves from his latest inflammatory proposal — a faith-based wall around the country — have been peddling their own nativist policies for months or years. They have been harshening their campaign speeches and immigration proposals in response to the Trump effect. Ted Cruz and Jeb Bush want to allow only Christian refugees from Syria to enter the country, and Mr. Cruz has introduced legislation to allow states to opt out of refugee resettlement.

In 31 states, governors — most but not all Republicans — have formed an axis of ignorance, declaring their borders closed to refugees fleeing the Islamic State in Syria. In Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott has sued the federal government and a nonprofit relief agency to keep refugees out. Indiana’s refusal forced one family to seek refuge in Connecticut. Georgia is seeking to deny displaced Syrians federal benefits, like food stamps, and keep their children out of school.

Civil rights organizations — the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Immigration Law Center and the Southern Poverty Law Center — are defending the displaced against blatant discrimination.  

[S]erious damage is already being done to the country, to its reputation overseas, by a man who is seen as speaking for America and twisting its message of tolerance and welcome, and by the candidates who trail him and are competing for his voters.

[T]he danger right now is allowing him to legitimize the hatred that he so skillfully exploits, and to revive the old American tendency, in frightening times, toward vicious treatment of the weak and outsiders. . . . . there are millions of Muslims who have good reason to fear that the darkness is falling again.

The time to renounce Mr. Trump’s views was the day he entered the race, calling Mexico an exporter of criminals and rapists. He played to the politics of nativism and fear that was evident last year, when a wave of Central American mothers and children, fleeing gang-and-drug warfare to the Texas border, presented themselves upon the mercy of the United States, and were met with derision and hysteria.

The racism behind the agenda of the right wing on immigrants and foreigners has long been plain as day. Mr. Trump makes it even plainer. After his remarks on Muslims, how many of Mr. Trump’s rivals have said they would reject his candidacy if he won the nomination? As of Wednesday, none.

Sane and decent Republicans need to understand that there is only one way to solve the nightmare: walk away and let the GOP self-destruct and then begin again with the Christofascists and white supremacists patently unwelcome in the party tent.