Republicans Remain in Denial About Donald Trump

To me, it was always obvious with anyone who bothered to really look at Donald Trump's career and personal life that the man was manifestly unfit for the White House.  Only deliberate refusal to see the man as he truly is - or affection for his racist, hate-filled xenophobic messaging - could justify having cast a vote for him.  And now that he is in the White House, Republican friends for the most part don't want to talk about him, much less argue as to why they voted correctly since, in their hearts, many I suspect realize that they made a horrific mistake that is inflicting incalculable harm to America.  Others, however, remain in denial, especially in the South and Mid-Western states where Trump has delivered no new jobs as he promised he would do, yet systemic racism and/or religious extremism continue to appeal those who voted for a morally bankrupt individual in the first place.  A few Republicans, however, are waking to the reality of what they have done to the country.  One is Republican Senator Jeff Flake who unloads on Trump and by extension the GOP in a new book. Politico has some excerpts from the book.  Here are some highlights:

Who could blame the people who felt abandoned and ignored by the major parties for reaching in despair for a candidate who offered oversimplified answers to infinitely complex questions and managed to entertain them in the process? With hindsight, it is clear that we all but ensured the rise of Donald Trump.

I will let the liberals answer for their own sins in this regard. (There are many.) But we conservatives mocked Barack Obama’s failure to deliver on his pledge to change the tone in Washington even as we worked to assist with that failure. It was we conservatives who, upon Obama’s election, stated that our No. 1 priority was not advancing a conservative policy agenda but making Obama a one-term president—the corollary to this binary thinking being that his failure would be our success and the fortunes of the citizenry would presumably be sorted out in the meantime. It was we conservatives who were largely silent when the most egregious and sustained attacks on Obama’s legitimacy were leveled by marginal figures who would later be embraced and legitimized by far too many of us.

To carry on in the spring of 2017 as if what was happening was anything approaching normalcy required a determined suspension of critical faculties. And tremendous powers of denial.

I’ve been sympathetic to this impulse to denial, as one doesn’t ever want to believe that the government of the United States has been made dysfunctional at the highest levels, especially by the actions of one’s own party. Michael Gerson, a con­servative columnist and former senior adviser to President George W. Bush, wrote, four months into the new presidency, “The conservative mind, in some very visible cases, has become diseased,” and conservative institutions “with the blessings of a president … have abandoned the normal constraints of reason and compassion.”

Under our Constitution, there simply are not that many people who are in a position to do something about an executive branch in chaos. As the first branch of government (Article I), the Congress was designed expressly to assert itself at just such moments. It is what we talk about when we talk about “checks and balances.” Too often, we observe the unfolding drama along with the rest of the country, passively, all but saying, “Someone should do something!” without seeming to realize that that someone is us. And so, that unnerving silence in the face of an erratic executive branch is an abdication, and those in positions of leadership bear particular responsibility.

But where does such capitulation take us? If by 2017 the conservative bargain was to go along for the very bumpy ride because with congressional hegemony and the White House we had the numbers to achieve some long-held policy goals—even as we put at risk our institutions and our values—then it was a very real question whether any such policy victories wouldn’t be Pyrrhic ones.  If this was our Faustian bargain, then it was not worth it.

Even as our own government was documenting a con­certed attack against our democratic processes by an enemy foreign power, our own White House was rejecting the authority of its own intelligence agencies, disclaiming their findings as a Democratic ruse and a hoax. Conduct that would have had conservatives up in arms had it been exhibited by our political opponents now had us dumbstruck.

So, where should Republicans go from here? First, we shouldn’t hesitate to speak out if the president “plays to the base” in ways that damage the Republican Party’s ability to grow and speak to a larger audience. Second, Republicans need to take the long view when it comes to issues like free trade: Populist and protectionist policies might play well in the short term, but they handicap the country in the long term. Third, Republicans need to stand up for institutions and prerogatives, like the Senate filibuster, that have served us well for more than two centuries.

We have taken our “institutions conducive to freedom,” as Goldwater put it, for granted as we have engaged in one of the more reckless periods of politics in our history. In 2017, we seem to have lost our appreciation for just how hard won and vulnerable those institutions are.

Flake sounds like he should leave the GOP.  The Republican Party that he calls for has ceased to exist and can only change when the majority of Americans get motivated and vote and send it into electoral exile.  That is the only way to kill the Frankenstein monster in the White House that the GOP has created.

Will the GOP Save Us From the Trump Monster?

Personally, I gave up on the Republican Party many years ago when I resigned from the party when it became clear to me that the GOP could no longer grasp or respect the concept of the separation of Church and state.  In the intervening years, the GOP has gone form ugly to downright hideous and grotesque.  Racism, white supremacy, religious extremism and contempt for objective facts and science are now the GOP norm.  It was a very different party in the days of my parents and grandparents. Now, with the election of Donald Trump as the Republican president of this once great nation, the GOP has reached a new low.  Lying and "alternate facts" pass for integrity and and honesty.  Thus, the question becomes that of who will save America from the Frankenstein monster it has unleashed?  I myself put almost zero faith in the willingness or ability of the GOP to redeem itself and save the nation.  I think that new popular forces and  new political approaches are all that stand between America and fascism or Trumpism, things that are not all that different.  Yet a column in the Washington Post calls of the GOP to rise to the occasion.  I will not hold my breath, but here are column excerpts:

What we know so far is that the man is who he is. There is no larger, finer man inside him trying to get out. Everyone who is paying attention knows this. Flags flying at the Capitol, the U.S. Marine Band, gray eminences in black coats, and He Who Is Smarter Than Those With Intelligence delivers 16 minutes of hooey and horse hockey about corrupt politicians betraying the people, and American carnage, and patriotism healing our division, though the division is mainly about Himself and though love of country does not necessarily make people stupid.

There might as well have been a 14-year-old boy at the lectern  . . . . The next day he motored out to the CIA and stood before the memorial wall honoring heroes who gave their lives in anonymity and he bitched about his newspaper coverage. The next day he boasted that his inauguration’s TV ratings were higher than those in 2013. The day after that, he told the congressional leadership that he lost the popular vote because millions of illegal votes were cast, which everyone in the room knew was a bald-faced lie, except perhaps Himself. The man is clueless, tightly locked inside his own small bubble. A sizable minority of Americans, longing for greatness or wanting to smack down an ambitious woman and to show those people in the hellhole coastal cities what the real America is all about, has elected him. To him, this minority is a mass movement such as the world has never seen. God have mercy.

Everyone knows that the man is a fabulator, oblivious, trapped in his own terrible needs. Republican, Democrat, libertarian, socialist, white supremacist or sebaceous cyst — everyone knows it. It is up to Republicans to save the country from this man. They elected him, and it is their duty to tie a rope around his ankle. They formed a solid bloc against President Obama and held their ranks, and now, for revenge, they will go after health insurance subsidies for people of limited means, which is one of the cruelest things they can possibly do. . . . . when upward of 30 million are left high and dry, people will suffer horribly.

The question is: How cynical are we willing to be and for how long? How long will Senate Republicans wait until a few of them stand up to the man? Greatness is in the eye of the beholder. American self-respect is what is at stake here, ladies and gentlemen. The only good things to come out of that inauguration were the marches all over the country the day after, millions of people taking to the streets of their own free will . . . . That’s the great America I grew up in. It’s still here.

Did Trump Just Sink the GOP?

Making it clear that he holds American democracy and wants to "crown himself king" to quote one headline at Politico, many are saying that Donald Trump has increased the chances for an electoral catastrophe up and down the GOP ticket.  Frankly, I hope the prediction proves accurate and that the GOP suffers horrific defeats.  For decades now, the Republican Party has been a festering swamp of insanity and rejection of objective reality and facts.  Lead by the Christofascists who live in a fantasy world, science has been rejected as has all respect for science and knowledge.  Donald Trump is but one example of where the embrace of ignorance and bigotry has taken the GOP.  A piece in Politico looks at the initial reactions to Trump's devastating performance during last night's debate.  Here are excerpts:

Donald Trump’s rocky performance on the final debate stage did little to allay his party’s concerns that the GOP is headed for an electoral catastrophe up and down the ticket.

In interviews with over a dozen senior Republican strategists, not one said Trump did anything to change the trajectory of a contest that is growing further out of reach. And many said they were deeply distressed by Trump’s refusal to accept the results of the Nov. 8 election, an eyebrow-raising moment already dominating headlines.

With Trump’s prospects for securing 270 electoral votes growing dimmer by the day, many Republicans have turned their focus to the gritty, unpleasant task of protecting the party’s congressional majorities. Trump, they said, did little to buttress the GOP ticket — and may have worsened its position by repeating his claim that the election is rigged, something congressional Republicans are sure to be pressed on in the days to come.

Immediately after Trump’s remark, several party higher-ups, including South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham and Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake, took to Twitter to distance themselves from it.

“The biggest loser tonight was not Trump, the presidential race is over,” said Robert Blizzard, a GOP pollster who is working on a number of congressional races. “Instead, down-ticket Republicans lost tonight — they needed some help and got absolutely none.”

While many candidates have taken a hit since the release of the bombshell “Access Hollywood” tape, party operatives maintain that the bottom hasn’t completely fallen out and that a down-ballot landslide isn’t necessarily in the cards.

Yet many Republicans were eager to see Trump deliver a steady performance, something that would stabilize his poll numbers at a time when surveys show him losing ground in traditionally conservative states like Arizona, Georgia, and Utah.

Steve Schmidt, who guided John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign, said that Trump’s refusal to commit to accepting election results would overshadow any other strong moments he had.

“It’s the one and only headline that matters coming out of the debate,” said Schmidt. “It’s absolutely unprecedented for any presidential candidate in the history of the country.”

To some, the performance represented what’s gone awry with the Trump campaign. After exhibiting moments of discipline early on, he squandered it later — with his remarks on the election, with his refusal to criticize Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, and with his comment that Hillary Clinton is a “nasty woman.”  That Trump would go so far as to criticize Ronald Reagan . . . on trade policy, left some Republicans aghast.

[T]he debate could have longer-term repercussions, potentially increasing the urgency with which down-ballot Republicans begin presenting themselves as a “check and balance” to a Clinton presidency. In doing so, they would all but concede that Trump is destined to fall short.

“Trump was already behind,” said Bill Kristol, a Trump critic and the editor-in-chief of the conservative publication The Weekly Standard. “He didn't help himself tonight, indeed he hurt himself. He's very likely to lose, and to lose badly. He'll drag the Senate and House down with him unless Senate and House candidates can make the case they're needed to check and balance Hillary.”

The moral?  Never nominate someone who is mentally ill to be your party's standard bearing.  The GOP deserves whatever catastrophes that may be the result of such irresponsible behavior and actions. 

Is the GOP, the Party of Lincoln and Reagan Headed Toward Extinction?

As a former Republican and GOP activist and City Committee member, I have often noted that I do not see how the GOP can be reformed and reeled back into sanity given the manner in which Christofascists, Tea Party loons and white supremacist were voted onto local committees across America.  There simply is no way that the so-called GOP establishment can kill the monster that it cynically created as it looked at short term opportunism with no eye toward the long term agenda. Now, the cancer has fully metastasized in the form of Donald trump and his core supporters.  Some believe that the GOP is now set on a course for extinction much as happened to the Whig Party in the mid 1800's.  A piece in the New York Times looks at this growing possibility.  Here are highlights:

Staunch in its opposition to the Democrats but rived by fierce internal schisms, the American political party stumbled toward defeat, its members cursing their fate. “We are slain,” cried Lewis D. Campbell, a representative from Ohio. “The party is dead, dead, dead!”

That was the election of 1852, when the Whig Party, then one of the country’s two major political forces, began to crumble over bitter arguments about slavery. The Whigs would dissolve within four years, to be reborn as the Republican Party — the very party now engulfed by its own civil war.

As this year’s extraordinary election hurtles toward its climax, scores of Republican leaders have deserted their party’s presidential nominee, Donald J. Trump. A snowballing scandal over sexual harassment and assault allegations has caused Mr. Trump’s poll numbers to crater, and some of the party’s top donors have suggested abandoning him altogether. But a solid core of rank-and-file Republicans stands defiantly with Mr. Trump, flocking to increasingly raucous rallies where the candidate vents his rage toward and disdain for a party that, at least theoretically, still backs him.

The turmoil raises a bracing possibility: Is an American political behemoth — a 162-year-old party that has produced 18 presidents, including Abraham Lincoln, Dwight D. Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan — about to fall apart like its predecessor?

“There is a real danger,” said William Kristol, the editor of The Weekly Standard, a conservative magazine, and an early critic of Mr. Trump. “But I wouldn’t panic yet. It’s very hard to know where we stand right now. A lot depends on the election in November.”

The Republican schism is in fact the culmination of simmering tensions within American conservatism. For years, the party has been an amalgam of factions: Christian evangelicals, free-marketeers, foreign policy hawks and more. The election of Barack Obama in 2008 helped spur the rise of a strongly conservative wing known as the Tea Party, with a brand of protest politics that fed off the anger of many white voters and created an opening for Mr. Trump this year.

Republican leaders have never been happy or comfortable with Mr. Trump . . . . But for months the leaders turned a blind eye to Mr. Trump’s verbal attacks on Muslims, Mexicans and women, hoping that even if he lost the presidential election, the party could retain its prime political asset: its majorities in the House of Representatives and the Senate.

Analysts predict that a crushing defeat for Mr. Trump could cost Republicans their advantage in the Senate and even their control of the House — a prospect that until recently was considered a distant possibility.

It is easy to forget that the Republican Party, now known as an anti-abortion and pro-gun stalwart, originated as the progressive face of American politics.

Founded in 1854 on a platform of opposition to slavery, the party was initially dominated by Northern states, which were more industrial.

In the years before and during the Civil War, the Democratic Party, which dominated the agrarian South, supported slavery. But the tables turned in the 1960s, when the Democratic Party championed an end to segregation and Southern states swung to the Republicans, increasingly the party of conservatism.

In the final weeks of the race, Mr. Trump’s scorched-earth campaign has exposed a yawning gulf between Republican leaders and much of the party’s base.

Some Republicans have had enough. At the party’s contentious national convention in July in Cleveland, I met Ryan Davenport, 25, a teacher from Dallas in a stars-and-stripes bow tie, who brimmed with fury at the ascension of Mr. Trump as the party’s standard-bearer. When I called Mr. Davenport last weekend, he said he had abandoned the party and would vote for Evan McMullin, a former C.I.A. operative who began a moonshot bid for the presidency as an anti-Trump independent.

Mr. Davenport said he took no pleasure in seeing the party he loved in disarray. But when fund-raisers for Mr. Trump called his house, he told them to leave him alone. “We have a predator running for president of the United States,” Mr. Davenport told me. “He’s radioactive.”

“Our views — the Republican intellectuals and think-tank people — differ from a significant chunk of the electorate,” said Avik Roy, a conservative strategist who likened Mr. Trump’s success to the rise of right-wing nationalist parties in Europe. “And it’s the electorate that decides.”

With several polling websites putting Mr. Trump’s chances of winning the election around 10 percent, he appears to be steeling for defeat, warning his supporters that the outcome of the election will be rigged. At a rally in Florida on Thursday, he struck an apocalyptic tone. “This is a struggle for the survival of our nation,” he said.  Or, at least, the survival of the Republican Party.

Trump Declares War on GOP

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.”

GOP Insiders: Trump Can't Win

I know that one should not get cocky until after the election results are in, but as a former Republican who is disgusted with what the GOP has become, I can't help but take some glee in the panic and despair raking GOP insiders over what Donald Trump.    My favorite comment comes from an Iowa Republican: "'Trump is under performing so comprehensively...it would take video evidence of a smiling Hillary drowning a litter of puppies while terrorists surrounded her with chants of ‘Death to America’'"  Trump is the culmination of the GOP's selling of its soul to Christofascists, white supremacists, and other misogynists for the last several decades while seeking short term gain with no thought of the cancer they were injecting into the party long term.  Politico looks at the desperation that seems to be growing.  Here are excerpts:

Republican insiders are more convinced than Democrats that Donald Trump is so far behind Hillary Clinton that he can't win in November.
 Roughly half of Republican members of The POLITICO Caucus — activists, strategists and operatives in 11 swing states — believe that Trump’s path to 270 electoral votes is basically shut off after another week in which the GOP nominee appears to have ceded ground in national and most battleground state polls.

Democrats, however, aren’t breaking out the champagne just yet. Seventy-two percent of Democratic insiders said despite Clinton’s clear advantage at this stage of the race, the presidential election isn’t effectively over. . . “We are in a great place,” added a Florida Democrat, “but nothing is over 89 days out, particularly with Clinton's trust issues.”

GOP insiders were virtually split, however: 49 percent said the race was already effectively over, while 51 percent said that it wasn’t.

“While it's true that previous candidates have come back from greater deficits to win, it won't happen in 2016. The electorate is far more base-driven, with fewer persuadables,” said an Iowa Republican. “Trump is under performing so comprehensively across states and demographics it would take video evidence of a smiling Hillary drowning a litter of puppies while terrorists surrounded her with chants of ‘Death to America!’

“Trump has failed to demonstrate he has a plan and path to 270” electoral votes, added a Wisconsin Republican. “Considering the disadvantage a GOP candidate starts with, the work in key targeted states like Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania has to be error-free. There is no evidence that Trump has done that or that he has much of a ground game to begin with.”

Slightly fewer than half of Republican Caucus panelists, 47 percent, said Trump is right to suggest his participation could hinge on the dates, times, identities of the moderators and other details — while 53 percent said Trump is making a mistake by not committing to the debates without conditions.

“The old adage is you cannot win an election through debates, but you can lose them. Donald Trump, as with anything, is the exception to this rule,” said an Iowa Republican. “He has GOT to win the debates or he will lose. Forfeiture is not an option. Last time he skipped a debate, he lost the Iowa caucuses.”

Other Republicans agreed with the overwhelming majority of Democrats, 85 percent, who said threatening to hold out of the debates was a mistake. One Michigan Republican said Trump “looks petty and scared.” Two Florida insiders — one from each party — called the GOP nominee “chickens---t.”

Added an Iowa Republican: “Someone has failed to teach Trump the basics of candidate school. He doesn't understand that he's no longer negotiating with [RNC chair] Reince [Priebus] and a single cable network. This is an entirely different thing. And leaving an empty chair against Hillary would be a complete disaster. He would look weak and scared and like a loser, which he would never allow around his brand. It would literally put a wooden stake in the heart of his entire campaign.”

Did Paul Ryan Just Predict a Hillary Landslide

The lack of principle and decency that has come to define the Republican Party is disgusting as are those in the GOP who pretend to be "thoughtful" and "guided by religious belief" even as they press for a drastic reverse Robin Hood policy agenda that mocks the Gospel message.  Few are more despicable in my mind than House Speaker Paul Ryan.  Thankfully, Ryan faces a primary challenge by precisely the type of far right nutcase that the GOP has carefully cultivated.   Even if Ryan wins, I find it delicious that he is now the target of an effort that is reminiscent of what took down Virginia congressman Eric Cantor.   This embrace of ignorance and normalization of the insane is what set the stage for Donald Trump's candidacy.  Now, belatedly, some think Ryan realized a much deserved disaster awaits in November. Here are excerpts from a piece in the Washington Post:

House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) sent an urgent fundraising appeal Thursday evening that warned: “If we fail to protect our majority in Congress, we could be handing President Hillary Clinton a blank check.”

Whether or not it was intentional, the phrase “blank check” has a political echo — one that suggests a deep fear by congressional Republicans that a sinking presidential candidate could take their majorities in the House and Senate with him, and that they are getting ready to desert him.

It goes back 20 years, to an infamous chapter in internecine Republican politics. In the weeks before the 1996 presidential election, as it became clearer and clearer that GOP nominee Bob Dole would not defeat incumbent president Bill Clinton, Republican operatives began urging their struggling congressional candidates to begin making the argument: “Let’s not give Clinton a blank check.”

In late October of that year, the National Republican Congressional Committee spent $4 million on television ads in 50 congressional districts where races were close. The final shot was of a blank check hovering over the Capitol dome. It was signed: “American taxpayer.”

For Dole, the implication that even his own party had given up on him was a devastating blow.

Ryan used the words “blank check” at least three times Thursday, as Trump sat below Clinton in the polls and continued to deal with the aftermath of controversies of his own making. This week, Trump refused to endorse Ryan in the Wisconsin Republican primary and praised Ryan’s underdog opponent, Paul Nehlen. It was a snub that angered many Republican leaders.

Katie Martin, a spokeswoman for the National Republican Congressional Committee, said the historical comparison is unfair.  “There is no news here, nothing to read into, no secret message about the upcoming elections,” Martin said in an email. “The possibility of giving Hillary Clinton a Congress led by Speaker Nancy Pelosi would be an unmitigated disaster for the American people — as it was 8 years ago with President Obama.”

However, they also have a standard-bearer who is far more toxic. In 1996, Dole was viewed positively by most voters, even as he lost. Trump, on the other hand, has the most unfavorable ratings of any candidate ever to lead a major party ticket since the advent of polling.

When asked whether there would ever be a point at which he would abandon Trump, Ryan said of his endorsement: “None of these things are ever blank checks.”

The email is signed “Speaker Paul Ryan” and includes this P.S.: “We cannot afford to give Hillary Clinton a blank check if she’s elected president. We need a strong, conservative majority in Congress as our last line of defense.”

Trump is a Frankenstein monster of the GOP's own creation.  I for one hope he kills the GOP instead of vice versa.  The GOP deserves to die at this point.

New anti-Trump Movement Includes Nearly 400 Delegates

As the Donald Trump campaign continues to look about to go off the rails - Trump fired his campaign manager today - the unease and near hysteria in some Republican circles continues to grow.  Now, as the Washington Post reports, the "Dump Trump" effort reportedly now includes over 400 of the delegates for the upcoming GOP convention.  I have little pity for those who want to stage a coup at the convention since over the years they have fostered the atmosphere in which Trump has thrived.  Indeed, they made racism, homophobia and misogyny platforms of the party even though they used dog whistle messaging.  Trump has merely taken their message from out of the smoke screens.  Here are Post highlights on the new effort to stop the GOP's Frankenstein monster:

A campaign to stop Donald Trump from becoming the Republican presidential nominee has the support of nearly 400 delegates to the GOP’s convention next month, according to organizers, quickly transforming what began as an idea tossed around on social media into a force that could derail a national campaign.

While organizers concede their plan could worsen internal party strife, they believe they are responding to deep-rooted concerns among conservatives about Trump, who is suffering from declining poll numbers after weeks of missteps and embarrassing headlines.

“Short-term, yes, there’s going to be chaos,” said Kendal Unruh, a co-founder of the group, Free the Delegates. “Long-term this saves the party and we win the election. Everything has to go through birthing pains to birth something great. We’re going to go through the trauma of the birthing pains, but the reward will be worth it.”

Unruh, of Colorado, said her cause is winning support from “the non-rabble rousers. The rule-following, churchgoing grandmas who aren’t out protesting in the streets. This is the way they push back.”

The campaign’s growing support came amid a significant shake-up in Trump’s campaign. On Monday, he fired his campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, one of his most loyal and vocal aides. The move was seen as an urgent attempt to ease GOP concerns over the campaign’s direction.

Thomson said at least 1,000 people participated in the call. Delegates who participated said they plan to spend this week wooing others to the cause.

In recent days Trump has called attempts to strip him of the party nomination “totally illegal” and a rebuke of the millions of people who voted for him. Over the weekend he accused former opponents Jeb Bush and Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.) of trying to undermine his candidacy. Both men say they have nothing to do with the new movement.

On the call Sunday night, leaders of Free the Delegates repeatedly insisted they are not working on behalf of any of Trump’s former opponents. They also lashed out at Chairman Reince Priebus and other officials at the Republican National Committee who have dismissed the delegates’ efforts as silly and a media-driven myth.

But several delegates said they were buoyed by House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.), who told NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday that “it is not my job to tell delegates what to do, what not to do, or to weigh in on things like that. They write the rules. They make their decisions.” Said Unruh: “Paul Ryan signed our permission slip.”

“My whole adult life I have been a loyal Republican. But this whole experience has really opened my eyes to what some folks I previously thought were nuts were warning us about,” Stinemetz said. “If you want to know how it’s possible for someone like Donald Trump to rise this far in our party, it’s because we have leaders like this.”

The Republican Freak Out Gathers Steam

Last night it was Ted Cruz who suspended his campaign and then this afternoon John Kasich did the same, thus leaving Donald Trump - a man endorsed by racist groups and winning only in the working class white male category - as the presumptive GOP presidential nominee.  While the so-called GOP establishment has for years courted extremists, racists, raging homophobes and theocrats, few ever believed that the Frankenstein monsters they unleashed would ever go so far as to overthrow the party's leadership.  Many conservatives don't like to be told that they are justly reaping what they sowed and/or that karma can be a bitch, but Trump is the creation of their own misdeeds and cynical pandering to those Republicans would have found abhorrent (I certainly cannot picture my late grand mother even trying to feign polite conversation with most Trump supporters).  As  a piece in Vanity Fair describes, the great GOP freak out has begun.  Here are article highlights:

Turning around to hug his family after dropping out of the presidential race Tuesday night, Ted Cruz managed to both accidentally punch and elbow his wife in the face, giving Republicans the perfect metaphor for the state in which he’d just left them. Donald Trump, a lurid orange candle of narcissistic fire, is now the party’s presumptive nominee for the presidency, and conservatives everywhere were not taking the news well.

Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus put on a brave face in a tweet sent shortly after Cruz dropped out of the race.  But on CNN the next morning, Priebus looked pained, saying he was “surprised” by Cruz’s “unexpected” move. “But now we have to say that it’s pretty obvious that Donald Trump is going to get to 1,237,” he told New Day host Alisyn Camerota.

Mitt Romney, who had attempted to reenergize the #NeverTrump movement with a well-received speech calling on Republicans to do everything in their power to deny Trump the nomination, took to Twitter to politely thank Cruz for his campaign, but remained silent about whether he would support his party’s standard-bearer.

Sen. John McCain hadn’t yet weighed in, but his former speechwriter, Mark Salter, immediately jumped ship, declaring “I’m with her [Hillary].”

Several prominent conservative leaders who had signed onto the National Review's “Against Trump” issue told the Daily Beast that, like it or not, they had to support Hillary Clinton now. “Hillary is ideologically not where I am,” said Leon Wolf, the editor of RedState, but argued that the former secretary of state would simply be a better president. “I wouldn’t go to bed every night worrying about a mushroom cloud opening up somewhere in the world because of some insane thing Trump had done.”

Erick Erickson, one of the first conservative commentators to speak out against Trump, told the Daily Beast that he would “de-register” as a Republican, saying that Trump’s nomination will rebrand the G.O.P. as the “party of white supremacists. . . . If Republicans aren’t going to stand up to having their party hijacked by a group of Aryan nation-types, then they get what they deserve.”

House Speaker Paul Ryan, who had previously flirted with the idea of parachuting into a contested convention, declined to say anything overt about Trump’s victory, instead posting old videos of himself delivering patriotic speeches about America’s future and the true meaning of conservatism.

Erick Erickson - who I generally NEVER agree with  - got it right in terms of what the GOP is becoming: a party of white supremacists and religious extremists who belong in mental institutions.   

Being Trump's VP Choice - Like Buying a Ticket on the Titanic?

For the better part of three decades or more the Republican Party has coddled, pandered to and embraced Christian extremists and those most motivated by hatred of others being it based on race, national origin, or sexual orientation.  The goal?  Short term election victories based on voters motivated by animus towards others.  Yet now, the so-called GOP establishment continues to display revulsion toward the natural outcome of the seeds that it sowed: Donald Trump.  In a column in the New York Times George Will - who seems to be becoming a slightly milder version of Pat Buchanan - is urging Republicans to do all they can to keep Trump out of the White House while striving to minimize the potential down ticket carnage he and others fear Trump would bring in November. Indeed, Will even speculated on who would be the best VP choice for Hillary Clinton to insure a Trump defeat (he likes Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio).

Now, a piece in the Times looks at the manner in which many in the GOP are fleeing from the prospect of being Trump's vice presidential running mate - something Senator Lindsey Graham equates to "buying a ticket on the Titanic."  Will in his column states that any Trump VP choice will be inherently unqualified because no one qualified would want the position and electoral doom.  Perhaps I am too much the cynic, but I am finding great pleasure in seeing the GOP reap the whirlwind of its own creation.  Here are highlights from the New York Times piece:

It’s a time-honored tradition for politicians to deny any interest in the vice presidency. But this year, with the possibility of Donald J. Trump as the Republican nominee, they really mean it.

“Never,” said Chris Schrimpf, a spokesman for Gov. John Kasich of Ohio, who is still running against Mr. Trump. “No chance.”

Or, as Senator Lindsey Graham put it, “That’s like buying a ticket on the Titanic.”

A remarkable range of leading Republicans, including Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina and Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona, have been emphatic publicly or with their advisers and allies that they do not want to be considered as Mr. Trump’s running mate. The recoiling amounts to a rare rebuke for a front-runner: Politicians usually signal that they are not interested politely through back channels, or submit to the selection process, if only to burnish their national profiles.

But Mr. Trump has a singular track record of picking fights with obvious potential running mates like Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, who has indicated a lack of interest in the vice presidency generally and has yet to reconcile with Mr. Trump publicly. Ms. Haley and another potential pick, Gov. Susana Martinez of New Mexico, have sharply criticized Mr. Trump at recent party gatherings and do not want to be associated with his sometimes-angry tone, according to advisers and close associates who have spoken with these Republicans.

Several Republican consultants said their clients were concerned that Mr. Trump’s unusually high unfavorable ratings with all voters and his unpopularity among women and Hispanics could doom him as a general election candidate and damage their own future political prospects if they were on his ticket.

A cross section of leading Republicans agree that his most sensible choice would be an experienced female governor or senator, given that he would most likely face Hillary Clinton in November and need support from a majority of white women to offset her strong support among blacks and Hispanics. Yet Mrs. Clinton is currently ahead of Mr. Trump with white women by double-digit percentages, according to a recent CBS poll.

The pool of Republican women in major offices is relatively small, and Mr. Trump has already alienated some of them. Governor Haley denounced him for not quickly disavowing support from the former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, and Governor Martinez has criticized his remarks about Hispanics.

The Donald Trump - RNC War Escalates

The RNC and the so-called GOP establishment continue to try to close their eyes to their own responsibility for setting the stage for the destruction of the Republican Party which they now want to lay at the feet of Donald Trump.  Without the RNC's and the GOP establishment's welcoming of Christofacists, white supremacists and know nothings into the GOP, there would be no Donald Trump candidacy.  Nor would Trump be attacking the party's inner workings and delegate selection process and  saying that the “system is being rigged by party operatives with ‘double-agent’ delegates who reject the decisions of voters.”  Personally, I love that karma is finally coming back to bite the RNC and so-called establishment in the ass big time.  For far to long the courted factions that decent people should have shunned and encouraged all kinds of misogyny.  Now, the are paying the piper.  Here are highlights from the Washington Post on the escalating warfare:

Tensions between the Republican Party and its own front-runner erupted into a full-blown public battle as top party officials rebuked Donald Trump on Friday for alleging that the GOP primary system was “rigged” against him.

The dispute, which has been simmering for days, centers on Trump’s failure to win any delegates last weekend in Colorado, which selected its 34 delegates at a party convention rather than a primary attended by voters. All went to Trump’s chief rival, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas.

The outcome prompted a daily stream of complaints and allegations this week from Trump, who wrote in an op-ed published in Friday’s Wall Street Journal that the “system is being rigged by party operatives with ‘double-agent’ delegates who reject the decisions of voters.”

A senior Republican National Committee official fired back with a thinly veiled response, writing in a Friday memo to reporters that “each process is easy to understand for those willing to learn it.”

The fight again pits Trump against a Republican establishment that is still broadly opposed to his candidacy and struggling to reconcile with the possibility that he could be the GOP presidential nominee in November. Veterans of past presidential campaigns warned that the feuding could have an adverse effect on down-ballot races and on the ability to defeat Hillary Clinton, seen as the likely Democratic nominee, in the fall.

“Traditionally, this is the time that the party and front-runner come together and make the plans necessary to defeat the Democratic candidate in the fall,” said Michael Steel, who was an aide for Jeb Bush’s campaign and previously worked on the Mitt Romney campaign in 2012 and as spokesman for John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) when he was House speaker. “That’s clearly not happening, and it’s going to make it tougher to beat Secretary Clinton.”

Ron Bonjean, a former top adviser to Republican congressional leaders, called the Trump-RNC showdown “unprecedented” and warned that “taking a flamethrower to the Republican Party machine” could backfire on Trump.

“This is like a general severely criticizing his own special forces before ordering them to go into battle,” he said in an email. “Trump runs the risk of demoralizing grass-roots party organizers when he is going to need every asset to help him beat the Democratic nominee.”

One of the keys to Trump’s success until now has been his willingness to harshly criticize the party establishment, but he will need the support of the RNC in fundraising and get-out-the-vote efforts if he wins the nomination. 

The fresh tension comes just as the party heads into another busy period of delegate allocation and selection. This weekend, seven states will hold meetings to select at least some of their delegates.

Republicans will gather in Georgia, Kansas, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Virginia for meetings in congressional districts to award their delegates. And in Wyoming, Republicans are hosting a convention similar to the one held in Colorado, and Trump’s team concedes that they are again poised to lose to Cruz.

Trump Was Created By the GOP Establishment

Paul Krugman has a column in today's New York Times that looks at an issue I often address, perhaps because I am a former Republican who believes that the party did not have to turn into something insane and ugly.  That transformation was made through the conscious efforts of the so-called party establishment and party leaders who put short term electoral wins ahead of decency and responsible leadership.   Appeals to racism became more and more open and once the Christofascists were welcomed into the party, the base became overrun with those proudly out of touch with objective reality and consumed with judging others and seeking special rights for themselves.  Now, as Krugman notes, the party establishment has lost control of the knuckle dragging elements they once welcomed into the party.  Donald trump has now beat the GOP establishment at its own game and made it clear that in pursuing his personal aggrandizement, he  is only too willing to use the well spring of hate and rage so long nurtured by the party establishment. Decency and responsibility have now been thrown to the wind.  Here are column excerpts:

Establishment Republicans who are horrified by the rise of Donald Trump might want to take a minute to remember the glitch heard round the world — the talking point Marco Rubio couldn’t stop repeating in a crucial debate, exposing him to devastating ridicule and sending his campaign into a death spiral.

It went like this: “Let’s dispel with this fiction that Barack Obama doesn’t know what he’s doing. He knows exactly what he’s doing.” The clear, if ungrammatical, implication was that all the bad things Republicans claim have happened under President Obama — in particular, America’s allegedly reduced stature in the world — are the result of a deliberate effort to weaken the nation.

In other words, the establishment favorite for the G.O.P. nomination, the man Time magazine once put on its cover with the headline “The Republican Savior,” was deliberately channeling the paranoid style in American politics. He was suggesting, albeit coyly, that a sitting president is a traitor.

And now the establishment is shocked to see a candidate who basically plays the same game, but without the coyness, the overwhelming front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination. Why?

The truth is that the road to Trumpism began long ago, when movement conservatives — ideological warriors of the right — took over the G.O.P. And it really was a complete takeover. Nobody seeking a career within the party dares to question any aspect of the dominating ideology, for fear of facing not just primary challenges but excommunication.

You can see the continuing power of the orthodoxy in the way all of the surviving contenders for the Republican nomination, Mr. Trump included, have dutifully proposed huge tax cuts for the wealthy, even though a large majority of voters, including many Republicans, want to see taxes on the rich increased instead.

But how does a party in thrall to a basically unpopular ideology — or at any rate an ideology voters would dislike if they knew more about it — win elections? Obfuscation helps. But demagogy and appeals to tribalism help more. Racial dog whistles and suggestions that Democrats are un-American if not active traitors aren’t things that happen now and then, they’re an integral part of Republican political strategy. Establishment Republicans generally avoided saying in so many words that the president was a Kenyan Islamic atheist socialist friend of terrorists — although as the quote from Mr. Rubio shows, they came pretty close — but they tacitly encouraged those who did, and accepted their endorsements. And now they’re paying the price. For the underlying assumption behind the establishment strategy was that voters could be fooled again and again: persuaded to vote Republican out of rage against Those People, then ignored after the election while the party pursued its true, plutocrat-friendly priorities. Now comes Mr. Trump, turning the dog whistles into fully audible shouting, and telling the base that it can have the bait without the switch. And the establishment is being destroyed by the monster it created. Things are very different on the other side of the aisle. . . . . The Democratic Party is, as some political scientists put it, a “coalition of social groups,” ranging from Planned Parenthood to teachers’ unions, rather than an ideological monolith; there’s nothing comparable to the array of institutions that enforces purity on the other side. But back to the Republicans: Let’s dispel with this fiction that the Trump phenomenon represents some kind of unpredictable intrusion into the normal course of Republican politics. On the contrary, the G.O.P. has spent decades encouraging and exploiting the very rage that is now carrying Mr. Trump to the nomination. That rage was bound to spin out of the establishment’s control sooner or later.  Donald Trump is not an accident. His party had it coming.

Trump Supporter: "Go To Fucking Auschwitz"

As one who loves history and who has read a fair amount about the rise of the Nazi regime in Germany in the early 1930's, I candidly find Donald Trump and his supporters to be increasingly frightening.   Like Hitler, Trump is playing to economic and social unrest and perhaps is unleashing a nightmare.  Here's a brief summary of what happened in 1930's Germany:

At the beginning of the 1930s, Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party exploited widespread and deep-seated discontent in Germany to attract popular and political support. There was resentment at the crippling territorial, military and economic terms of the Versailles Treaty, which Hitler blamed on treacherous politicians and promised to overturn. . . . . the Nazi party offered strong leadership and national rebirth. From 1929 onwards, the worldwide economic depression provoked hyperinflation, social unrest and mass unemployment, to which Hitler offered scapegoats such as the Jews. . . . . the regime was against cultural modernism and supported the development of an extensive military at the expense of intellectualism.

Sound familiar?  Trump's entire platform boils down to a coordinated use of hatred towards others, and opposition to modernity and social changes, and discontent to rally extremely ugly elements in the GOP base.  This hatred and discontent has been cynically nurtured for many years by the so-called GOP establishment for electoral purposes.  Now, it seems that a raging conflagration has been ignited that will be difficult to control.  In 1930, few Germans foresaw what the Nazi's would ultimately unleash on that nation or the world.  Closing one's eyes and telling one's self that the ugliness will pass is not an answer.  Trump, and to a similar extent Ted Cruz, and what he represents MUST be opposed and stopped.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at the growing threat and societal cancer posed by Trump and his supporters.  Here are excerpts:

An already ugly presidential campaign has descended to a new level — one where the question is no longer whether Donald Trump can be stopped on his march to the Republican presidential nomination, but whether it is possible to contain what he has unleashed across the country.

Violence at Trump’s rallies has escalated sharply, and the reality-show quality of his campaign has taken a more ominous turn in the past few days.

On Saturday, a man charged the stage in Dayton, Ohio, and a swarm of Secret Service agents surrounded the GOP front-runner.

Later Saturday at a Trump rally in Kansas City, the candidate was repeatedly interrupted by protesters, who were then removed from the venue. Outside the rally, police said they used pepper spray to control crowds. Kansas City police said that two protesters were arrested.

The racially tinged anger that has both fueled Trump’s political rise and stoked the opposition to it has turned into a force unto itself. It has also brought a reckoning from his three remaining rivals for the Republican nomination, who are shedding their fear of provoking Trump and of alienating the raging slice of their party’s base that has claimed him as its leader.

But Trump should not be viewed in isolation or as the product of a single election, President Obama said Saturday at a fundraiser in Dallas.  Obama said those who “feed suspicion about immigrants and Muslims and poor people, and people who aren’t like ‘us,’ and say that the reason that America is in decline is because of ‘those’ people. That didn’t just happen last week. That narrative has been promoted now for years.”

A low point came Friday night. Where Trump has delighted in mocking hecklers — and condoning attacks on them by his supporters — he was forced to cancel a rally at the last minute after protesters turned up by the thousands. That set off a chaotic scene in the arena at the University of Illinois at Chicago that left a handful injured and thousands agitated.

[Trump's] candidacy and the sentiment it provokes have also stirred disturbing historical comparisons.

GOP political consultant Stuart Stevens, who was a top strategist for 2012 nominee Mitt Romney, said Trump’s rhetoric is “almost verbatim” what segregationist George Wallace was saying in his third-party 1968 presidential campaign.   “What did the Democratic Party do with Wallace? They rejected him.”

Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida said Saturday. “This is a man who at rallies has told his supporters to basically beat up the people who are in the crowd and he’ll pay their legal fees. Someone who’s basically encouraged the people in the audience to rough up anyone who stands up and says something he doesn’t like.  “I still at this moment continue to intend to support the Republican nominee, but it’s getting harder every day.”

Ohio Gov. John Kasich condemned Trump for creating a “toxic environment” that has led supporters and protesters to “come together in violence,” but he, too, stopped short of saying he would not support his Republican rival if Trump secures the party’s presidential nomination.

[T]he outbreak of violence in Chicago had again drawn focus to Trump’s temperament and character, as well as whether he has played a role in inciting his supporters.

Asked about the criticism from other Republican candidates following the Chicago cancellation, Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski mocked them: “Do they have protesters at their events? Do they have any people at their events?”

Lewandowski — who has been accused of and denies manhandling a female reporter at a Trump event — also said his candidate does not plan to do anything to calm his supporters.

“The American people are angry,” Lewandowski said. “They’re upset at the way this country has been run. They’re upset that this country is being taken advantage of by every other country in the world. And they’re tired of not being proud to be Americans.”

“My people are nice,” Trump said at his rally in Dayton. “Thousands and thousands of people, they caused no problem. They were taunted, they were harassed by these other people. These other people, by the way, some represent Bernie, our communist. . . . He should really get up and say to his people: ‘Stop. Stop.’ ”

Sanders retorted in a statement issued by his campaign:  . . . . “What caused the protests at Trump’s rally is a candidate that has promoted hatred and division against Latinos, Muslims, women, and people with disabilities, and his birther attacks against the legitimacy of President Obama,” Sanders added, referring to Trump’s false assertions that Obama was born in Africa and was therefore disqualified to be president.

Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton also jumped into the fray.  “The ugly, divisive rhetoric we are hearing from Donald Trump and the encouragement of violence and aggression is wrong, and it’s dangerous,” she said at an appearance in St. Louis. “If you play with matches, you’re going to start a fire you can’t control.”

Clinton is right, Trump and his supporters are dangerous.  As for his campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, he apparently views himself as a modern day  Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's Minister of Propaganda.  Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo summed up what Trump is doing well:

What we have seen over the last two weeks isn't just an escalation of chaos and low level violence but a progressive normalization of unacceptable behavior - more racist verbal attacks, more violence. . . . The climate Trump is creating at his events is one that not only disinhibits people who normally act within acceptable societal norms. He is drawing in, like moths to a flame, those who most want to act out on their animosities, drives and beliefs. It is the kind of climate where someone will eventually get killed.