If there’s anything good to say about Trump’s white nationalist speech in Phoenix on Wednesday, it’s that it’s bad. Not bad as in evil—though it certainly is that—but bad as in bad politics. Bad for election day. Bad for Trump.
Trump’s speech will make it even harder for him to make inroads with voters he needs in November. Most Americans disagree with his approach. A fresh Fox News poll—which shows Clinton up just 2 points (41-39)—finds that voters, when presented with a choice, back setting up a system for illegal immigrants currently working in the United States to become legal residents over deporting them by a 77-19 margin. Those supporting legalization back Clinton over Trump by 18 points.
Recent polls have shown Trump with only around 14 percent of the Latino vote. But the policies he snarl-shouted this week have could carve away at even that already pitiful value. They’ve certainly sent Trump’s few visible Latino supporters running for the door. Trump already “enjoyed” support among black voters that is within the margin of error of none at all. His effort to stigmatize and alienate Latino voters has already put his support 21 percent below what Mitt Romney took in a losing effort. He needed those votes. He’s not going to get them.
And what Trump is doing to the Republican Party is more than just a Trump problem.
This is bigger than one election: Trump is causing massive LONG-TERM damage to the Republican brand. We’re not focusing on it right now because we’re 68 days out from an election, but it is hard to overstate what an unmitigated disaster this is for the party in the Sunbelt, the intermountain West and beyond. As I’ve explained before, Trump in 2016 is to the national GOP what Proposition 187 was to the California GOP in 1994.
Trump is sending the Republican Party down a chute toward irrelevance. It feeds Trump's post election "movement,” but it does nothing to establish a party that can win in future elections.
Donald Trump may like hearing crowds chant his name, but the price is being a big, fat loser.
Of all the responses to Trump’s speech, James Hohmann at the Washington Post provides the most thoughtful rundown. In addition to the comments cited above …
Republicans facing four more years in the wilderness will long recall the raucous rally in Phoenix as a low point of the Trump campaign, perhaps even as the moment that he definitively extinguished his hopes of becoming president.