While I find Donald Trump nothing less than frightening, at the same time another part of me cannot help but laugh out loud at the whirl wind that the Republican Party has brought upon itself by embracing Trump. Trump is the culmination of the off the rails journey that the Republican Party began first by Nixon's launching of the "Southern Strategy" and lead to fruition by the embrace of the Christofascists who reject science, modernity, and objective reality. I saw the early phases of this latter phenomenon shortly before I resigned from the City Committee for the Republican Party of the City of Virginia. The point to be remembered is this: members of local city and county committees are elected to their positions. One cannot join simply because one wants to be a member. Thus, every white supremacist, every Christofascist, every raging homophobe, and every anti-Hispanic bigot, was VOTED onto their local committee. Now, Trump has declared war on the establishment GOP. Here are excerpts from a piece in the Washington Post:
Donald Trump declared war on the Republican establishment Tuesday, lashing out at House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (Wis.), Sen. John McCain (Ariz.) and other GOP elected officials as his supporters geared up to join the fight amid extraordinary turmoil within the party just four weeks before Election Day.
One day after Ryan announced he would no longer campaign on Trump’s behalf, the GOP nominee said as part of a barrage of tweets that the top-ranking Republican is “weak and ineffective” and is providing “zero support” for his candidacy. Trump also declared that “the shackles have been taken off” him, liberating him to “fight for America the way I want to.”
Trump called McCain “foul-mouthed” and accused him with no evidence of once begging for his support. McCain, the party’s 2008 presidential nominee,pulled his endorsement following a Friday Washington Post report about a 2005 video in which Trump is heard making vulgar comments about forcing himself on women sexually.
“I wouldn’t want to be in a foxhole with a lot of these people, that I can tell you . . . especially Ryan,” Trump said in an interview with Fox News Channel. He said if he is elected president, Ryan might be “in a different position.”
By backing away from Trump, Ryan and his allies were hoping to insulate themselves and their majorities on Capitol Hill from the baggage weighing down the nominee’s flagging campaign. For many, the breaking point was the 2005 video.
But they are suddenly dealing with another problem: an impulsive and bellicose businessman with an army of loyal supporters willing to exact retribution against elected officials they feel have abandoned them. The rift could have profound ramifications for the Republican Party as a whole, shattering any sense of unity and jeopardizing its chances of holding onto the Senate and even, potentially, the House.
Speaking on his radio show Tuesday, popular conservative talk-show host Rush Limbaugh said: “The Republican Party has sided with its donors and its lobbyists, and this is why we’re where we are. The Republican Party is in a predicament that it made itself. It made its own bed, and now they don’t want to lay in it. Now they want to run from the bed that they made.”
The sentiment that Trump is far from ideal but is better than the only realistic alternative is one many of his backers are clinging to as justification for maintaining their support.
“You don’t go after somebody who is, as Ronald Reagan would say, your 80 percent friend. What you do is stand with them,” Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) said in an interview with Fox Business Network. “And it is not helpful to have this kind of drama going on. What you need to do is say we have a binary choice.”
Campaigning for Clinton in Greensboro, N.C., Obama called Republican officials out for the way they have dealt with Trump.
“They can’t bring themselves to say, ‘I can’t endorse this guy,’ ” Obama said. Of those who did pull their endorsements, the president added: “Why’d it take so long for some of them to finally walk away? We saw this coming.”
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