The mainstream media doesn’t always report the way that we want, the news that we want, or all that we want—but they do represent the last link we have in the chain that extends more than 200 years back to our founding fathers’ belief that an informed citizenry is essential to a functioning democratic republic.
Donald Trump is hardly the first Republican to go after the press, but he is the most open about his antipathy. He is the least willing to hide his contempt for the press and by proxy, for the American people. Because the press is there to ask the questions to which we need to know the answers. So when he shuts out the Washington Post or the New York Times, he shuts us out as well.
Nor is Trump the first Republican to attack our military service members. The self-proclaimed party of national security hasn’t been one for at least a generation and-a-half, ever since they discovered the greater rewards offered by government contractors. The Republicans will vote down funding for Veterans’ Administration budgets that care for our wounded fighters. They will vote for any possible cut to military compensation, either direct pay or benefits, in order to continue funding big expensive weapons systems, even those that the Department of Defense does not want, and, it seems, especially those that do not work. All the while, they ignore that those fancy high rises leading out to Dulles International Airport did not get built without the sacrifices of thousands of men like Army Capt. Humayun Khan.
Republicans, led by Phylis Schlafly, won the fight against the Equal Rights Amendment during the 1980s. Henry Hyde was a Republican when he introduced and passed the Hyde Amendment that prohibited the spending of federal tax dollars for abortions, taking away the choice of poor women. And Republicans in states across the nation have been hard at work trying to take away the right of all women to control their own bodies. They have been at war with women for most of my adult life. So is it any wonder that Donald Trump is running on a platform of denigrating women? Of suggesting that sexual harassment is up to the individual to handle? Isn’t he merely articulating what the GOP has always been thinking?
In typical Republican "I’ve got mine, screw you” style, Donald Trump has decided to build a wall across our southern border. He is not the only Republican that wants that wall built. John McCain appeared with the self-styled minutemen on the Arizona border, where that state’s governor claimed immigrants were beheading people and littering the desert with their body parts. The GOP has come a long way toward complete surrender to xenophobia since Ronald Reagan signed the immigration reform bill in 1986, and when George H.W. Bush extended amnesty to an additional 1.5 million people in 1990.
Yes, Trump is the walking, talking manifestation of the right-wing ideology that has taken control of the Republican Party. His candidacy, which daily looks to implode, is not an outlier. He is mainstream GOP, with communication skills amplified by Hannity, O’Reilly, Coulter, and Limbaugh.
Running for the presidency of the United States requires a mind that was clearly not present when Trump sat down for an interview with Phil Rucker of the Washington Post. Easily distracted by his own picture on a television screen, the interview is a series of bizarre answers to questions that weren’t asked and avoidance of those that were. The presidency is a hard job and requires the ability to concentrate on a single problem in the midst of a million distractions—though perhaps none as powerful as one’s own televised image.
We can see his lack of discipline in his campaign, which is even now falling apart. And while many pundits, including Josh Marshall, are suggesting that the Republican Party will tolerate Donald Trump as their candidate, that it is too late to replace him even if he were willing to quit the race, many pundits also thought he would implode during the primaries.
That is why it must be made clear, repeatedly, that Donald Trump is only saying out loud what the GOP has always believed. That includes its contempt for our military, our working class, our press, women, people of color, immigrants, and the disabled. It is important that this be made so obvious that if Trump does drop out, if the Republicans can find someone who does not have enough sense to come in out of the rain, and if they can manage to put his/her name on the ballot in all 50 states by election day, that candidate will not be able to escape the damage done by Donald Trump’s loose lips.
Instead of headlines claiming that Trump has said something stupid, they should say that the Republican Party has done something stupid. Trump is the party’s head and standard bearer. He is the Republican Party.
And as soon as everyone is done celebrating the fact that the Koch brothers’ network has refused to provide financial support to his campaign, we may want to consider that all of the money that had been planned for a presidential race must be spent somewhere. It will go to the down-ballot races—to critical state judgeships, governors, mayors, state legislators, as well as Congressional and Senate races. We have to be ready to fight back.
Like Democrat Deborah Ross of North Carolina is doing. She is not just running against the incumbent Republican Sen. Richard Burr, but by putting a Trump cap on him, she is making clear that the Republican Party is the party of Trump and Trump speaks for Burr.
Trump lacks anything close to the temperament or judgment needed in a man wielding the nuclear codes, and for that reason alone he should be barred from the Oval Office. However, his policy positions are all mainstream Republican policies. From building a wall to vilifying Hillary Clinton, from exacerbating the pain of a Gold Star family to his discussion of how he would default on our debt with the same insouciance of the Congressmen who would refuse to lift the debt limit because the occupant of the White House happens to be a black Democrat: He is Republican to the core. He is the epitome of what the Republican Party has become.
Defeating him is not enough. We have to destroy the ideology he represents.