For four long, embarrassing, tortured years, Donald Trump has gotten away with being a virulent racist. He’s gotten away with it mainly because the party he purports to represent has consistently ignored, laughed off, refused to comment on, or attempted to explain away his inexcusable behavior. But those days may rapidly be coming to a close.
Trump is devolving, and everybody but Trump knows it. His blatant racism is becoming more frequent, and more pointed. And it’s only going to get worse from here on out, since he is rapidly losing all of the other distractions that he could call on, such as the Trump-Russia investigation, and Robert Mueller. The attacks are becoming more base and disgusting, and it’s becoming harder for anyone, even the Republican party to ignore or explain away.
I’ve said before, and I’ll say it again: while very few of us are racists, all of ushave prejudices. There are things, people, and even groups that we individually just instinctively just don’t like. That’s called humanity. But the vast majority of us make the conscious decision to keep those personal feelings walled off from the world at large, that’s why we’re not racists. They have no such moral compunctions. Like Donald Trump.
It was one thing for a Jewish-American like Gary Cohn to stand idly by while Der Trumpenfuror praised racists and neo Nazi’s. That was Cohn’s personal choice, and he is welcome to it. But Cohn had the additional advantage of not having voters to face, and that’s not true for almost everybody else.
Right now, there are 197 Republican House members up for reelection in 2020, along with 22 incumbent GOP Senators, and Trump has potentially put them at risk. And while the 2018 midterms may have culled down the GOP House herd to more base Trump-friendly representatives in allegedly “safe” districts, there are still some like Will Hurd in Texas that are on the bubble. And Trump’s overt racism is making it nigh on impossible for the Republicans to try to flip back any of the swing House districts that they lost in 2018. And in the Senate it only takes three seats to flip control if a Democratic President is elected, and Arizona is already well within reach.
Every GOP incumbent in 2020, both House and Senate, is going to have the anvil of Trump’s racism hung around their necks by their Democratic challengers. Incumbents are going to be hard pressed to respond, since they have all either ignored, or worse yet, defended Trump’s racist claptrap.But Republicans challengers to Democratic incumbents will face the same stiff challenge, since their opponents only have to bring up Trump’s overt racism, and leave the challengers trying to deal with the guilt by association.
Trump’s racism is not going to get better, in fact it is only going to get worse. And as it does, it places every GOP candidate in an ever increasingly untenable position electorally. It will be interesting to see at what point do some, and how many GOP incumbents jettison Trump, in order to try to save their precious seats. Don’t touch that dial.
Cross posted on Politizoom.com where exclusive content from Murfster35 can be found