Here’s the kind of campaign Donald Trump is inspiring in Virginia, which will elect a new governor this year:
[Corey] Stewart joined a group railing against the planned removal of a statue of Gen. Robert E. Lee from a park in downtown Charlottesville.
“We’ve got to defend our culture; we’ve got to defend our heritage,” Stewart barked before supporters that included men holding Confederate flags, according to a video on his Twitter page.
With a ravenous appetite for rhetorical bombast, Stewart is campaigning as an unapologetic disciple of President Trump, echoing the president’s populist diatribes against the Republican establishment, undocumented immigrants, political correctness and the media. [...]
Hoping to raise his profile, Stewart, 48, has adopted Lee’s statue as a cause celebre and deployed showman-like antics such as raffling off a semiautomatic weapon to raise campaign cash. On Twitter, he lacerates Gillespie with Trumpian flourish, referring to the former chairman of the Republican National Committee as “Establishment Ed.”
The good news is that Stewart isn’t getting a whole lot of traction—he’s doing attention-grabbing things without actually grabbing much attention. But this is the chair of the board of supervisors of Virginia’s second-most-populous county, not just Some Dude. And unless Trump starts losing the affections of the Republican base—which is holding strong for him so far—we’re likely to see this kind of campaign repeated around the country in Republican primaries. Which means vile, bigoted opinions being normalized as part of Republican political discourse.