What do you with a problem like Donald Trump? Republicans don't know. Trump's continued and seemingly unending attacks on a not-white-enough federal judge have them in a funk.
Mr. Trump’s doggedness, and his chastisement of his own aides, contributed to a sense of powerlessness among Republicans who said they increasingly saw no way to influence Mr. Trump’s behavior or to convince him that his actions could hurt the party in competitive House, Senate and governor’s races.
Note that this fretting isn't about maybe not standing alongside a man saying overtly racist things—you know, maybe doing the decent thing—but about the overt racism hurting their election chances. Pillars of courage, the lot of them.
But Mr. Priebus has had similar conversations over many months with Mr. Trump, to little avail. And other senior Republicans said there was confusion about whether it was worth approaching any of Mr. Trump’s aides about doing an intervention with him.
Given that you apparently only get to be a Trump aide by praising his genius no matter what stupid clusterf--k of an idea he's got lodged in his head, it’s safe to say that’s a no.
But of course there's a very simple answer here. You could not support the racist! You could make that party of Lincoln speech mean something other than a rote, insulting demand that non-white Americans vote for you because a century and a half ago your party didn't suck quite so badly. Little did we know that agreeing that black human beings shouldn't be owned as slaves would be the high water mark of Republican civil rights tolerance.
No other modern presidential campaign has unfolded like this, and gleeful Democrats have concluded that one of their best strategies for the general election is to hold Republicans accountable for each new Trump bombshell.
This is the premise of the Times story, by the way—that there's an organized effort by Democrats to point out that Republicans supporting an overt racist are, in fact, supporting an overt racist, and that maybe if other Republicans think they deserve elected office they should at least have the minimal courage necessary to not support the worst guttural instincts of a racist sexist conspiracy-theory-promoting sack of crap. I don't know that it should be called an organized effort so much as an at long last moment in politics, a transgression against the things we supposedly stand for so egregious that not even the most craven of political hacks should be able to stomach it.
Not so much an "organized effort" on the part of Democrats, then, as a collective American dry heave.
It remains very unlikely that ambitious Republicans and those on the ballot this year will publicly break with Mr. Trump until it becomes politically advantageous for them.
Yup. Screw doing the right thing, unless it becomes politically advantageous. Then they'll be sure to get right on that.
At the moment, Mr. Trump enjoys wide support from the sort of rank-and-file Republican voters whom elected officials are loath to antagonize.
After all, you've got to remember that these are just simple rank-and-file Republican voters. These are people of the tea. The common clay of the new conservatism. You know ... morons.
So to sum up: No, apparently there still isn't anything Donald Trump can do that will make supposedly courageous, principles-driven Republicans reconsider their support for and endorsements of him. And they think it is darn rude for people to keep pointing that out.