Donald Trump just keeps on saying stupid, outrageous, offensive things—and all too many of them are things that tie in to his party's weaknesses. The Republican Party has had its problems with rape comments from Republican politicians in recent years, and with Latino voters, and with its opposition to policies friendly to working women. So having its leading presidential candidate talking a lot about Mexican immigrants being rapists, and thinking that
pumping breast milk makes a woman "disgusting" isn't a big step forward for the Republican Party's image.
That's the cue for Republican operatives to try to spin it away.
"When questioned on specifics, they're the team that has spent more time on prime time than all other campaigns combined, but they're really not ready for political prime time," Doug Heye, a former spokesman for the Republican National Committee, said of the Trump operation. "I don't know anybody who thinks he's representative of the party." [Emphasis added]
Sorry, but a party's leading candidate for president will always be seen as representative of their party. Maybe not the only representative, but they can't be disowned. And Donald Trump especially can't be disowned when he was out there as the voice of the birthers in 2011 and whose 2012 endorsement Mitt Romney
gratefully accepted.
It's not like Trump was never connected to the Republican Party or the priorities of its base before this moment. This moment when he is, again, the leading Republican candidate. Who is simply expressing the unvarnished version of widely held Republican views and policies. But then, that's the problem: Republicans who want to distance themselves from Trump can't put much real daylight between him and their party, so they're stuck issuing weak denials and calling for the civil veneer to be reapplied to their hateful positions.