Donald Trump weighs in on the powerful testimony of Khizr and Ghazala Khan, whose son was killed by a car bomb while serving in Iraq. It was, as has become normal for the Republican candidate, repulsive.
“If you look at his wife, she was standing there. She had nothing to say. She probably, maybe she wasn't allowed to have anything to say. You tell me.”
And has Trump sacrificed, as the Kahn family has?
“I think I've made a lot of sacrifices. I work very, very hard. I've created thousands and thousands of jobs, tens of thousands of jobs, built great structures. I've had tremendous success. I think I've done a lot.”
He is, of course, completely unfit for the presidency. More than that, he is a monster. A sociopath. A man who is so consumed with his needs and with the political convenience of denying the very humanity of the other, in this case a Muslim American father and mother and son, that he dismisses their very humanity. The wife was suspiciously silent, he declares. The sacrifice of a son was little compared to the sacrifice of his own "success," he opines. And were they even the words of grieving parents, really?
“Who wrote that? Did Hillary's script writers write it?”
Again Khizr Khan has called upon Republicans Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan, by name, to repudiate Trump's rhetoric and hatred. That they remain silent is proof enough that the Republican party is both dead, as ideological force, and very much deserves to be. They stand by Trump because they would rather win the presidency, even at the long odds Trump provides, than stand against his anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, anti-other sociopathies. There is no party ideology left, other than the one that demands they be put in charge of things. There is no pushback to the forces of racism and dark nationalism left—it is not worth it to them, they cannot risk it, they have no countering ideology of their own to even push back with. The party’s media mouthpiece, Fox, did not provide their viewers Khan’s own testimony. They hid it under a commercial, as they hid most other fragments of testimony from the inconvenient other that presented themselves onstage to dispute Trump’s dark paranoia.
Party pundits and leaders grumble about Trump's malevolent and optimism-free rhetoric, but none provide a counter to it. They grumble about his grotesque hostility towards non-white Americans of all stripes, but do not dare reject him for it; to do so might endanger whatever scrap of power Mitch McConnell or Paul Ryan or the empty suit that still shuffles around pretending to be Marco Rubio can still claw towards.
This is Trump. There is no other. This is the Republican Party that stood up and pledged themselves to him just last week—apparently, there is no other.
