An amazing thing happened—again—following Hillary Clinton’s second major address in the last week targeting Donald Trump’s unfitness to serve as president. After her latest speech, an ardently progressive oration on reproductive freedoms delivered as the keynote speaker to a Planned Parenthood conference—in which she called for increased government funding for Planned Parenthood and expanded access to abortion care—all that Republicans could muster up in response was a single paragraph of boilerplate from the RNC that didn’t even mention the GOP's own nominee—and that the committee didn’t even bother to tweet out. If there was a coordinated response to push back against Clinton’s general election kickoff (which was carried live by cable news networks), it bordered on the invisible.
And yet, remarkably, that was more than Republicans managed after Clinton’s devastating declamation in San Diego a week earlier, in which she eviscerated Trump on foreign policy and reminded the media and voters alike just how perfectly suited she is prosecute the case against this clownish, gilt-plated grifter who hijacked a quiescent Republican Party and now threatens the world’s safety. After that speech, the RNC said nothing at all. The only press release it issued was sent out before Clinton even spoke. Following her talk came only dead silence from the Republicans.
What could possibly account for this? Is the RNC criminally incompetent? That diagnosis can never be ruled out. But even the most incapable party organization ought to be able to put together some kind of rapid response after its long-feared opponent bloodies its nominee so thoroughly and publicly. And this reticence goes far beyond the RNC: The entire GOP establishment seems to prefer attacking Trump to Clinton these days, and said hardly a thing about the former secretary of state’s speeches. So could there be another explanation?
Following Clinton’s foreign policy address, former Daily Kos associate editor Kaili Joy Gray put forward an intriguing thesis to explain the GOP’s bizarre disappearance:
And this was before the Planned Parenthood speech. Now that we've seen the same pattern play out a second time, Gray’s theory seems even more plausible. If anything, the silence was far louder on this occasion, since Clinton mentioned the word “abortion” 16 times and even called for the repeal of the Hyde Amendment, the law that prohibits the use of federal money to pay for most abortions. Clinton didn’t spell it out, but getting rid of the Hyde Amendment would mean opening the door to government funding of abortion. That Republicans couldn’t get themselves worked up over that is quite amazing.
Before you write off the idea of Republicans secretly or subconsciously wishing for Clinton to defeat Trump as too conspiratorially minded, consider this: For years now, the Republican Party has been defined by a special type of dysfunction that leads many of its members to act one way but hope for the exact opposite outcome. Such adherents have been called members of the Vote No, Hope Yes Caucus, and while that term was coined after conservatives in Congress began regularly voting against budget bills they wanted to see pass—lest the government shut down or default on its debts—yet felt they had to oppose to avoid primary challenges, it applies here, too.
We know that supposedly mainstream Republicans wanted to stop Trump but were utterly unable to do so. Why they failed—and why they failed to act—will be studied by journalists, historians, and political scientists for years to come. But despite their failure, their feelings about Trump as evidenced by their halting, awkward embrace of the candidate, haven’t changed. They still want him stopped, whether or not they admit it out loud or to themselves, and now there’s only one person who can do it. She happens to be a Democrat, and she happens to be named Hillary Clinton, but she isn’t just our savior—she’s theirs, too.