Quick, somebody alert Sarah Palin! Some of her fellow Republican politicians appear to be in the midst of one of them-thar apology tours!
Just as pressure is mounting on Republican elected officials to fall in line behind Trump, Sens. Joni Ernst of Iowa, Cory Gardner of Colorado and Dan Sullivan of Alaska are in South Korea undercutting Trump's bluster with assurances that the U.S. is not about to renege on trade agreements or demand its allies pay more to support American forces on Korean soil.
Mind you, when your party is dispatching Joni Ernst, Cory Gardner, and Dan Sullivan as Republican voices of moderation and reason you are very hard up indeed. But don't worry, they're telling our allies, our candidate will never do those things he keeps muttering about!
"Whether it is Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump, we have an absolute commitment and resolve to growing our alliance with Korea, and there is no going back," Gardner told the South Korean news agency Yonhap News on Wednesday. [...]
Ernst and Sullivan also apparently voiced disagreement with Trump's assertion that South Korea doesn't pay enough to keep 28,500 U.S. troops on its soil and asserted that Trump's position on the matter is ill-informed and unlikely to be folded into the official Republican Party platform next month at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland.
"Relax, everybody. Our candidate is just an idiot."
Of course, whether or not Trump's repeated promises to work America's allies over for a little more protection money makes it into the Republican Party's platform doesn't bear any relation to whether or not he would attempt those things as president. It also doesn't mean that Republican senators like Joni Ernst, Cory Gardner, and Dan Sullivan wouldn't quite readily go along with whatever President Summer Squash felt like doing at any given moment. We've already seen the "Never Trump" movement fizzle as they and their colleagues bend knee toward the candidate so much of the movement considered to be completely unfit for the job. It’s unlikely that these promises to foreign nations will instill much confidence, given the support the party's been giving Trump so far.
And speaking of completely unfit for the job, America's security officials are having cold sweats over the thought of Donald Trump getting top-secret security briefings. Or, even worse, his nutcase-laden staff.
"People are very nervous," said one senior U.S. security official.
Intelligence and other security and foreign policy officials are also trying to determine "who on (Trump's) team are trustworthy, the official added. "We've never had a situation like this before. Ever."
Now, now. Have more faith in Trump—by October he'll not only have learned the most bigly amount of top-secret knowledge any candidate has ever bigly learned, he'll have set up Trump Classified University, a place devoted to teaching you, the paying public, how best to cash in on that information. And Joni Ernst, Cory Gardner, and Dan Sullivan will probably be cutting ads for it.