Hillary Clinton gave the speech about Donald Trump that, with a few changes, House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) could have given. And he should have.
That is the first paragraph of this Washington Post column by E. J. Dionne, whose title I have borrowed for this posting.
Here’s the third graf:
Instead of sticking to his vaunted principles, Ryan forged a link between the Republican Party and Donald Trump that may endure in public consciousness long after this campaign is over.
Now, you probably think I am going to go paragraph by paragraph through the Dionne piece. Sorry, although I will return to it.
There is another piece in today’s Washington Post that I think needs to be read in conjunction with this. It is an editorial signed by Fred Hiatt, editorial page editor of the paper, titled The questions GOP leaders must answer. Hiatt begins with this paragraph:
Republican leaders, having fallen in behind Donald Trump, may hope that they can move beyond daily questions about their presumptive nominee. In fact, their endorsements should guarantee that the questions have only begun.
Hiatt approaches this topic by reminding us that 8 years ago a candidate was challenged about whether he supported the statements made by someone with whom he had a close association, statements that were considered quite controversial:
Think back eight years to the firestorm ignited by revelations that Barack Obama’s pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, had said in a sermon, “God damn America.” Obama, then an Illinois senator running for president, was hounded by reporters to repudiate the comment.
That is the 3rd paragraph. I will return to the 2nd in a moment. Hiatt then connects that with what is happening in this cycle:
Today, it is the candidate who is making the incendiary comments. Don’t voters in Ohio, Arizona and elsewhere have a right to know whether their leaders agree or disagree with the views of the man they have endorsed?
During the course of his editorial Hiatt will challenge John McCain, Mitch McConnell, Reince Preibus, and Rob Portman. You can read the questions with which he challenges them, and his explanation.
What is relevant to this posting is what he puts in his 2nd paragraph:
Speaker Ryan, you have decided to support Trump because you believe he will support your legislative agenda. Do you also agree that anyone with a Hispanic surname should be disqualified from presiding over any cases having to do with the nominee or his businesses?
Of course we now know the Trump might want to disqualify Muslim judges, perhaps were his case in NJ even the Muslim judge appointed by his good buddy Chris Christie. And we know Ryan struggled to respond to the remarks about Judge Curiel — just describing them as being out of left field was not a complete response.
Why are Republican leaders struggling to respond to the incendiary and what should be out of bounds statements by Trump? Even despite the words of people like McConnell, who last night tried to justify his support for Trump’s candidacy despite those statements by changing the subject, by suggesting that Trump would for example appoint better judges than Clinton, Republican leaders are no dummies, they probably do not expect Trump to win the Presidency, but they want his voters to turn out for other reasons. I think E. J. Dionne grasps what is going on, as expressed in this paragraph:
But party leaders have decided that Trump’s nativism and racism, his utter disrespect for the judicial system, his soft spot for foreign dictators and his latent authoritarianism matter far less to them than holding on to power in Congress. It will be up to the voters to decide how big a price Ryan, Mitch McConnell & Co. should pay for this.
I happen to think that their support of Trump despite the rhetoric will actually cost them seats, if the Democratic party can quickly unite behind Hillary Clinton, because I suspect that she will tie all Republicans to Trump, and thus possibly achieve not only regaining the Senate, but even maybe just taking back the House.
In any event, if the Republican leaders are tied closely to Trump, and the presumptive Republican nominee continues his pattern of outrageous statements, he will not only have taken over the Republican party, he may well have destroyed it for several cycles.
Dionne’s piece is largely an examination of why he thinks Clinton’s “foreign policy” speech that so lambasted Trump was so effective. He parses some of the rhetoric.
I think the most brilliant part of the speech was hammering the point that Trump is thin-skinned. When he responded with outrageous rhetoric — that because Clinton criticized him she should go to prison — he effectively proved her point, and gave license to the media to rerun all of her cutting statements about him.
Dionne writes that
Trump, coarsely but unsparingly, has given voice to the extreme hopelessness that has gripped such a broad swath of the Republican electorate — egged on in its anxieties by its more conventional leaders.
Those leaders are worried about what has become the “base” of their primary electorate, which is things like the Tea Party. It is not that Trump has brought millions of new voters into the system, or even drawn millions to the Republican party. He has gotten some who did not previously participate in Republican presidential primaries but voted Republican in presidential generals to turn out. That is why what happened in what was originally a 17 person primary is not indicative of what will happen in the general.
Trump has also engaged these people in Republican primaries for lower offices, some of which take place AFTER the primaries and caucuses for the presidential nomination, and that makes Republican office holders nervous. Further, if they are not seen as supporting Trump, and Trump loses, expect to see a variant of a line of argument from the first part third of the 20th Century across the Atlantic in Germany, the notion of being stabbed in the back.
Dionne thinks the attitude of “unending gloom” gets repeated by Republican leaders because this new base demands that of them.
We should remember that McConnell has already told his caucus he does not have trouble if those in competitive releections distance themselves from the man who will be at the top of the ticket. I wonder if Ryan might do the same.
In any case, you might also consider the final paragraph from Dionne:
And so Ryan and his colleagues will now be stuck defending an indefensible man even as Hillary Clinton occupies Lincoln’s high ground in proclaiming our country as “the last best hope of Earth.” There is, however, this: Many who say they support Trump will be praying quietly and fervently for Clinton to prevail. Ryan may be among them.
One has to wonder whether Dionne might just be on to something?