Who Needs A Pack Of GOP Cowards Too Scared To Face Down Trumpf?

Why are so many cowardly Republican elected officials afraid to take on Trumpf as he leads their party into classic fascism? I mean have you heard a word about Trumpf from Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley? Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson? Missouri Senator Roy Blunt? New Hampshire Senator Kelly Ayotte? We have heard from Ohio Senator Rob Portman, though. He told The Hill he'd vote for Trumpf. These cowards are too cowed by a toupee-wearing bully with a loud mouth to save their own party and they expect voters to trust them with protecting America? At least Colorado freshmen Senator Cory Gardner said what everyone in DC thinks, that Trumpf is "a buffoon." But Pat Toomey, who's petrified of Trumpf and doesn't understand how to handle a bully is boycotting the Pennsylvania Republican Party's big fundraiser Friday because Trumpf is the headliner, citing a sudden mysterious "scheduling conflict" rather than calling out Trumpf. The money Trumpf raises will go to GOP efforts to reelect Toomey.

One reason they're so scared is because Trumpf is pugnacious and has a core of allies who are also bullies-- from Ann Coulter to the Hate Talk Radio brigades. When Chris Christie went on Michael Medved's show to call Trumpf's ban-all-Muslims nonsense unconstitutional and said "this is the kind of thing that people say when they have no experience and don't know what they're talking about; we do not need to endorse that type of activity, nor should we," guess how Trumpf reacted. Trumpf, at his Know Nothing rally in South Carolina Monday said Christie spoke out because he's "not doing well in the polls... "I've been nice to Christie, but he really hit me today. He really hit me on the whole thing with we have to stop the Muslims until we find out what's going on... Look, here's the story: The George Washington Bridge, he knew about it. Hey, how do you have breakfast with people every day of your lives. They're closing up the largest bridge in the world. They never said, 'Hey boss, we're closing up the George Washington Bridge tonight.' No, they never said that. They're talking about the weather, right? So he knew about it. Totally knew about it... I would say that there's less than 1% chance [Christie's being honest]. It could be. But I doubt it. He knew about it... No. 2, nine downgrades of the state. Nine downgrades. It's a disaster. I have property over there, the taxes are through [the roof.] I'll use an expression: coming out of my ears, OK? Tremendous taxes over there... You had Christie so friendly with President Obama during the flood. I actually called, I said, 'Let me ask you, is he going to vote for Obama?' I thought he was going to vote for Obama. I don't know, I think he possibly did."

Most congressional Republicans who have been willing to take on Trumpf at all, do so very tepidly. Yesterday Paul Ryan managed to choke out the mildest of rebukes: "This is not conservatism. What was proposed yesterday is not what this party stands for and more importantly it's not what this country stands for... Freedom of religion is a fundamental Constitutional principle. It is a founding principle of this country." Trumpf sneers at that kind of weak talk as "politically correct." As Janell Ross pointed out yesterday at the Washington Post, Trumpf isn't all that interested in what educated voters think of his antics. He's appealing directly to the Fox/Hate Talk brainwashed, lo-info, uneducated base of the GOP. The two most recent polls I saw, a PPP poll of North Carolina Republicans, with Trumpf at 33% (his highest ever for this poll and with #2, Cruz, at 14%) and a Montana State University-Billings poll of Montana Republicans also showing Trumpf way head with 22%, are pretty typical. How is that possible? Ross, using polling data asserts that "Trump's support is strongest with Republicans... across the country who do not have a college degree." Only 8% of his supporters have college degrees (and that 8% includes fake religious colleges).

Economic worries as well as anxiety about a shifting cultural landscape have long been hard to separate from this. American immigration policy has even been directly shaped by these forces. And people who face the most direct competition with immigrants for jobs or see large numbers of immigrant workers entering or working in their fields have repeatedly fueled or responded to political movements in the United States that center around concern, fear and or loathing of immigrants.

Today, workers at the top of the education and income scales face some increasingly well-documented competition from well-educated immigrant workers and workers abroad. But it's Americans at the bottom who tend to face job competition most intensely.

Here's why: The majority of immigrant workers in the United States today arrived with limited education and can perform the same tasks as American workers who do not have college degrees or specialized training. And even some immigrants with training in medicine, the sciences, engineering and other fields can not readily practice their profession in the United States without significant time and money to invest in education, training and testing in the United States. So immigrant workers are clustered in manual labor jobs, service industry work and some factory and retail positions. These are, of course, jobs largely held by American-born people of color and whites with limited education.

In regions such as the Midwest and South, where globalization and American trade deals have arguably ravaged industries that once provided family-sustaining wages for some of these same sets of workers, the competition for even these often low-wage jobs is intense. Adding to the situation, when the nation's most recent immigration surge-- much of it illegal-- began in the 1990s (and ended around 2007, according to Pew Research Center data), many immigrant workers found jobs in the Midwest and South. These are areas of the country that had not seen large influxes of immigration for more than 100 years. Perhaps an ongoing, if smaller, trickle of immigrants to the Northeast has something to do with why attitudes about immigration seem far different there than in other parts of the country.None of that is to say that this read on immigration and immigrant labor is totally accurate, logical or properly channeled. Labor unions, whose members tend to vote for Democrats, now champion immigration reforms that would extend some some sort of legal status to the nation's estimated 11.3 million undocumented immigrants.

Their thinking: This will relieve some of the downward pressure on wages and level the playing field between immigrant and native-born workers. Big business interests and many economists insist that immigrant workers largely fill roles that American workers don't want or are no longer practical and, in this sense, help to fuel opportunity and even some pressure for American workers to gain more skills, education and training.

Those are two ways to view things. The Trump way is another.

So there you have it. In a nutshell, the people pushing Trump to the head of the polling pack in the very crowded Republican field, the people who have assured Trump a position on the debate stage next month and the people fueling Trump's candidacy are-- overwhelmingly but not limited to-- white, Republicans with limited education. They have their reasons.

His followers don't care what's said about him and a GOP focus group led party officials to conclude the people who like him have an attitude that makes whatever is said about their "strongman," goes in one ear and out the other without making any impression. GOP leaders are tip-toeing around Trumpf's latest outrageous unAmerican diatribe against Muslims. The NRC's cowardly chairman Reince Priebus managed to man up enough to whisper to the right-wing website, WashingtonExaminer, "I don't agree. We need to aggressively take on radical Islamic terrorism but not at the expense of our American values... That's as far as I'm going to go." He's still shaking in his boots that Trumpf will run as an independent. Would he rather see him run as the Republican nominee?