It's delicious watching Republicans fuss and flail and try to figure out what to do about their Donald Trump problem—a problem that's
a symptom of the party's deeper long-term problems.
It turns out, interviews show, that the mathematical delicacy of a Republican victory in 2016 — and its dependence on aging, anxious white voters — make it exceedingly perilous for the Republican Party to treat Mr. Trump as the pariah many of its leaders now wish he would become.
Republicans can't afford to piss off Trump's
many supporters, but the party's leaders really would have preferred to keep those voters happy with messages sent through dog whistles, not foghorns. Because everyone hears a foghorn—swing voters, Democrats who only turn out to vote if they're angry, and definitely the populations being called rapists at top volume.
“As a presidential candidate, he’s taking a problem we already have as a party and making it worse,” said Senator Lindsey Graham, another White House aspirant. “If we continue this we’re going to accelerate the demographic death spiral we’re in.”
Graham is a realist on this if not on his own chances at the presidency. Republicans are overwhelmingly a party of white people, which isn't sustainable as the U.S. population shifts. But since the white people they rely on to win elections now aren't going to accept messages or policies that do anything but alienate black and brown people, Republicans have to walk a delicate line between giving up votes now and giving up votes in the future. And many prominent Republicans—Donald Trump high among them—are not so good at delicate.