The Futility of Trump's GOP Challengers

Donald Trump skipped another Republican Party presidential primary debate and seemingly will pay no price for it.  Why?  Two reasons: (1) the base of the GOP has become so ugly and dangerous that  they truly seem to want an overthrow of democracy and the murder of anyone opposing Der Trumpenfuhrer, and (2) none of Trump's would be challengers dare to call out the man's growing insanity out of fear of upsetting the most hideous elements of the GOP base.  Thus, the "debate" became a meaningless vanity project for the attendees who attacked each other but never brought the fight against Trump.   It was so pathetic that one can see why the advertising rates for the debacle were reduced. A column in the New York Times looks at the debate which in some ways was akin to rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic as the danger Trump poses to the nation went utterly unchallenged by the spineless participants.  The take away is that the GOP has truly become a cult and no one within the party has the courage to do what must be done.   Here are column highlights"

Donald Trump won’t be defeated with sound bites. He won’t be bested with wordplay. Ron DeSantis carped repeatedly that Trump was “missing in action” at the Republican presidential debate on Wednesday night, while Chris Christie called Trump a coward and christened him “Donald duck.” How very clever.

And how totally futile. They were throwing darts at the absent front-runner when missiles are in order.

Trump has a mammoth lead over all of them, and there’s no sign that it’s shrinking. He’s skating to the party’s presidential nomination. Along the way, he’s doing quadruple axels of madness, triple toe loops of provocation. He’s fantasizing about executing a respected general and he’s fetishizing firearms, his words coming close to incitements of violence. He’s not sorry for the Jan. 6 riots. To my ears, he’d like more where that came from.

But did any of the seven candidates onstage at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, Calif., talk about that? Nope.

Christie, the bravest of a timid bunch, gave eloquent voice to how profoundly Trump had divided the country, pitting friend against friend and relative against relative, and while that’s sadly true, that’s also beside the point.

The point is that Trump has zero respect for democracy and aspirations for autocracy. The point is that he keeps scaling new pinnacles of unhinged. The point is that he needs to win the presidency so that he doesn’t have to worry about living out his days where he belongs — behind bars.

And perhaps the only shot that any of those seven candidates has to stop him and prevent the irreversible damage he’d do to the United States with four more years is to call a tyrant a tyrant, a liar a liar, an arsonist an arsonist. None of them did.

They’re too frightened of his and his followers’ wrath. So forgive me if I chortled every time they talked about leadership, which they talked about often on Wednesday night. They’re not leaders. They’re opportunists who are letting an opportunity slip away from them.

The hopelessness of their quest for the presidency and their deepening awareness of that were reflected in all the shouting and cross talk. Dear Lord, what a din . . . . My ears will be ringing until the next Republican debate, scheduled for early November in Miami. Those poor Floridians. With DeSantis as their governor, haven’t they suffered enough?

Instead of taking Trump sufficiently to task, instead of explaining in full why just about any one of them would be preferable to the madman of Mar-a-Loco, Nikki Haley and Tim Scott quarreled about drapes. Yes, drapes.

Instead of savaging him, the seven candidates tore into one another, seemingly vying not to catch up to Trump but to be declared the No. 1 alternative, like a beauty pageant runner-up poised to fulfill the winner’s duties and wear the winner’s tiara should the need arise.

DeSantis was more aggressive than ever, a contender of faded promise making a last stand. . . . Haley tussled with him, with Scott and especially with Vivek Ramaswamy, who was yet again the political equivalent of a jack-in-the-box, popping up every time you hoped that he’d finally been squished down. Haley called nonsense on his nonsense, telling him: “Every time I hear you, I feel a little bit dumber.” It wasn’t very kind, but it was wholly relatable.

There have now been two Republican presidential debates. Trump has proudly skipped and obnoxiously counterprogrammed both of them. And his punishment from his supposed rivals has been a dainty slap on the wrist.

The moderators on Wednesday night were just as gentle on him, never posing a question as pointed as one during the first debate, when the candidates were asked whether they’d support Trump as the party’s nominee even if he became a convicted felon.

It’s a matter of our country’s survival. But from the way seven candidates danced around the danger of Trump, you’d never know it.