Now that the race to be the standard-bearer for the Republican party has devolved—literally—into a public dick-measuring contest, panic is setting in. Republicans seem to be waking up to the fact that the win-at-all costs strategy they've employed with a vengeance since President Obama took office has backfired. The cost has turned out to be the soul of the party, but the lesson doesn't still doesn't seem to have totally sunk in.
The growing discord and contrasting styles are just the latest illustration of a party at war with itself amid a nomination fight that veered off the rails a long time ago. This rising clamor is the sound of a fragile Republican Party, a coalition held together in recent years by fraying threads between the donor class and the grassroots, breaking apart.
John McCain, who also chimed in Thursday, urged voters to come to their senses. “I want Republican voters to pay close attention to what our party’s most-respected and knowledgeable leaders and national security experts are saying about Mr. Trump, and to think long and hard about who they want to be our next commander in chief and leader of the free world,” he said.
(His spokeswoman later clarified to POLITICO, however, that he wouldn’t rule out voting for Trump in November: "As Senator McCain has said, he will support the Republican nominee.”)
Every one of the candidates on stage last night, trying desperately to bring Donald Trump down? They'll all support him when he becomes the nominee, they say. Why?
Because this:
But the hard reality is likely that their voices no longer matter to the party’s rank-and-file voters, at least not those backing Trump, who revel in his upending the party’s establishment class of Washington power brokers and K Street consultants. At his raucous rally in Portland, Maine, on Thursday, Trump dismissed Romney as “a failed candidate” who “let us down.”
They created a monster and its face is Donald Trump. But they'll all support him if he gets the nomination because turning over the party to an erratic, vulgar, racist, misogynistic dilettante—turning the nation over to him—is preferable to an experienced, capable, respected, serious Democrat. They've admitted it. A Republican senator said out loud that a KKK-loving Trump is better than having a Democrat in the White House.
Winning, and rewarding the very worst elements of the GOP, is more important than the country.