Chuck Todd is unhappy with Donald Trump's Republican candidacy. He is making the other candidates feel bad. He is not playing by everyone else's rules. Has he even "earned"
the right to run?
This is the problem with Trump. He doesn't play by a set of rules. And this is why campaigns complain to folks like me off the record but they don't have the guts to criticize him on the record because they know he's kind of a media bully. You know what I mean? He doesn't -- he plays by his own set of rules. He'll say whatever.[...]
We all have a responsibility here I think to say, you know, has he earned his way on this stage? I mean, again, we're four years removed from the ridiculous spectacle of birtherism.
We're not at all removed from his ridiculous spectacle of birtherism, given that Donald Trump has still not admitted error on that one. And while I would love a new press rule that says America no longer has to take conspiracy peddlers and devoid-of-facts liars seriously, at the moment top Republican voices in Congress are contemplating whether or not to possibly shut down the federal government—again—in response to yet another one of the frothing base's lunatic conspiracy theories. Donald Trump's theories on the un-Americanness of the current sitting president are not intrinsically less embarrassing than previous candidates' notions of a government setting up secret
death panels. Or government "ammo hoarding." Or Benghazi "stand-down" orders. Or a worldwide network of powerful, sinister climate scientists plotting against ma and pa coal plant.
In case some of us are still unclear on this, the promotion of lunatic conspiracy theories has been the defining characteristic of the new, "tea party"-enabled Republican policymakers. Donald Trump's suppositions that, for example, Mexican immigrants are mostly drug dealers is fundamentally identical to House immigration policy maker Steve King, who admonished us all to note the super-sized calves of those same immigrants, a characteristic of ferrying heavy drug loads across that border. Welcome to modern American politics, my dear media stalwarts. Feel free to pull up a chair and watch for a while.
I don't want to see the Republican primary race or any presidential race turn into a three-ring circus and us, you know, sitting there going isn't this great? And look at the shiny metal objects. It's not fair to what is the strongest Republican party presidential field in 36 years.
Head below the fold to discuss the "strength" of the Republican party.
And here we have our problem: This notion that the current Republican field is "strong," the strongest in a generation, if it were not for the meddling of sideshow Donald. The current Republican field is numerous. It is not strong. A bag of mice is not stronger than a pit bull, no matter how much it wiggles, and a 16-person presidential field made up almost exclusively of embarrassments is not stronger than two, three, or five candidates who demonstrably might know what the hell they are talking about. Which are the strong candidates, then? The universally despised-by-his-peers senator? The other senator who achieved electoral success bequeathed by his father, and who has accomplished precious little since? The governor turned Christian radio shock jock? The senator who abandoned efforts to get his party to be slightly less racist after polls showing the party didn't think much of the idea? The indicted fellow? The not-indicted one? The one who touts union busting as his ostensible foreign policy credential? The universally acknowledged-as-a-failure last president's brother? If there was any one of these candidates capable of building more than a ramshackle case for leadership of their deeply fractured, ostentatiously paranoid party, they would not have fifteen mostly embarrassing opponents. Even the party financiers are finding themselves flummoxed on which of these three-legged horses to back.
The premise that Donald Trump's entry into the race is doing a disservice to Republicans or to the Republican nominating process can be rebutted simply by citing Donald Trump's Republican poll numbers. Republican voters have given him the top spot, and by a wide margin. The party base likes what they hear. Whatever high-minded notions you might have about policy expertise or divorcing the party from conspiracy mongering might be lovely indeed, but the actual Republican Party—the voters—is not with you on that one. You might imagine party leaders to be fretting over the inclusion of outright conspiracy nuttery in party discourse; they will get back to you on that after they write the next round of fundraising letters on Hillary something Benghazi. And everyone might fret feverishly over Donald Trump being rude to Latino voters, upon which everyone might notice that sowing paranoia about brown people is a reliable staple of Republican campaign rhetoric from coast to coast and that according to Serious Republican tellings in recent election cycles the American desert is riddled with decapitated heads and the conservative-led border states of Texas and Arizona are barely more than lawless killing fields.
Donald Trump is leading in the polls. He is not being foisted on the Republican Party—the Republican base has, at least for the moment, adopted him. He has earned the center podium in the debates because he opined about Mexicans being rapists and John McCain not being a true hero and the base responded each time by pledging more votes, not fewer. Yes, my dear media friends, welcome to the extraordinary spectacle, the cheap paranoia and the radical anti-intellectualism of the new Republican Party. Have you been away long? Do sit down, set your hats on the rack, your rifles on the coffee table and let the base make you some tea.