The attempt among Republicans and in the media to pretend that what Donald Trump is doing is not part of mainstream Republican dirty politics can't be allowed to pass into the common wisdom. The Republican politicians who have been part of his putrid campaign disprove that. Chris Christie, Mike Pence, Rudy Giuliani, Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell,.... Republican governors, House members Senators, sitting and retired, major Republican figures in the party apparatus, all of them endorsed Donald Trump, many of them have said or excused things as awful as what Donald Trump and his surrogates have said in this campaign, many of them have said similarly irresponsible or just plain rotten things in their own campaigns and in claims made on cabloid and during the Sunday morning lie fest.
The Republicans of 2016 are a party which has increasingly used exactly the kind of Trumpian language and lies to whip up their base which, by design, includes blatant and flagrant racists, white supremacists, ethnic bigots, misogynists, LGBT bashers, etc. The fact is the people Trump spoke to were members of the intentionally built Republican coalition from well before Trump, some of them courted by Republicans going back even before Richard Nixon's infamous Southern Strategy to mine Southern racists who left the Democratic Party when it pushed through the Voting Rights and Civil Rights acts. Before that the Republican Party, the party of bankers and business executives, harnessed various other paranoids, bigots, imperialists and crazy people. In the Truman period and on into the 1960s Democrats tried to include some of them, as well, but in the 60s the Democrats decided to leave that aside and try to move into a new and better future, Republicans opted to try to maintain the receding past. And with a succession of presidential wins and, especially, Supreme Court appointments, the Republicans have been increasingly successful in assembling their coalition, appealing to the worst in people through the mass media that, in its degraded American form, is so good for appealing to the worst instead of anything better.
The Republican Party and its media megaphone can't be allowed to continue to pretend that they didn't create Donald Trump - literally create him as a public persona - and the conditions that allowed him to win the nomination of the Republican Party. Look at the field of Republican candidates who had any chance of winning the nomination, Cruz, Rubio, Kasich. It is so telling of how truly awful a field it was that John Kasich was presented as the "reasonable moderate" when he was, in fact, a truly horrible right-wing governor of Ohio, one whose anti-women policies, alone, marked him as typical of the extreme contemporary Republican party. And, by and large, the Republican-friendly media allowed him to lie about that though it was certainly known to be a lie.
Donald Trump in all his putrid awfulness is mainstream Republican, he will get a majority of the Republican vote in this election, if he were to win the Republican defections will be very few and mostly by people belonging to the ethnic and other groups he has targeted. It took the infamous Boy on the Bus tape to get only some of them to abandon Trump because they worried he could cost them their elections. If he won the Kelly Ayotts would mend bridges just as such former critics as Chris Christie and, yes, Paul LePage did when it was clear he would win the nomination. Considering what Republicans other than Trump have been doing and saying for a generation, you have to wonder why those who decided Trump was too much didn't leave before. It's not as if their leadership in the Congress, in governorships, within Republican presidential administrations, their surrogates on TV haven't said the same or worse than Donald Trump has. If the infamous tape hadn't surfaced. they wouldn't have tried to pretend they didn't support him and what he stands for.
The Republican Party which has so endangered the democracy of the United States can't be allowed to pretend they didn't do what they did. If Trump hadn't won the nomination of their party, it is a sure bet someone as bad though not as colorful or undisciplined would have been their nominee. If we dodge the Trump bullet, the Cruz or Kasich bullets, and others as bad, are still in the gun, which one will be fired in four years is the only question. And, one thing you can bet on, they likely won't have a sleazy sex tell-all tape to sink their prospects. They are all Trump style people, they just lack the show-biz glitz and outsider status. If Trump were a real insider the media would cover for him. And if not them, lest it be forgotten, there is still Jeb Bush. I'm sure, for example, that any of them would appoint people to the court as bad as anyone Trump would appoint. And the media would support that choice.
This election has been exhausting but unless, by some miracle, the Republicans aren't mortally wounded, their coalition of racists, misogynists, sleazy billionaires and other businessmen, etc. will reform and present exactly the same danger that Donald Trump merely embodies in one easy target. They will still pose exactly the same danger to democracy and to the world, only in a more easily sold wrapper. We can't allow that to happen. This has to be made to stick to them. They've earned it over the last century.
Hate Update: Ha, look at the time stamps. I posted my piece about 23 minutes before Duncan posted his. I'd guess he didn't read it before he wrote what he did and I don't expect to find anything at E-ton so I certainly don't go looking for ideas there. If we arrived at similar places about the malignant character of the Republican Party after Trump, that's not shocking, it's the history of the modern Republican Party.
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