Are Ryan And McConnell Leading The GOP To Doom By Colluding With Trump?

Yesterday on Fox New Sunday Karl Rove explained that Trump was "making a political statement" by pardoning vicious racist Joe Arpaio and that it's "a bad mistake." Not a bad mistake for the already tragic, written-in-stone Trumpanzee legacy, a bad mistake for the Republican Party. I haven't seen any reports of what Jennifer Detlefsen, daughter of Trump's Secretary of the Interior, Ryan Zinke, thinks about all the racism, but I guess her epic diss of Trump on Instagram last month still stands-- and covers a lot of ground: “This veteran says sit down and shut the fuck up, you know-nothing, never-served piece of shit. #itmfa." In case you're wondering, that hashtag, #itmfa, is an acronym for "impeach the mother fucker already."

Nice to know Republicans are starting to feel what the rest of us have been feeling for half a year now. Even Trump's chief enabler, Paul Ryan, was so horrified by his latest display of overt racism that he had a spokesperson go out and say something to the effect of "the speak thinks this is naughty, naughty."

Last week, Jonathan Capehart went considerably further than that in the Washington Post, labeling Trump "a cancer on the presidency." Capehart wrote that "The damage Trump has done to the presidency is unmistakable. The damage done to the nation is incalculable. He is unfit to serve... He is siding with racists who want to turn the clock back to the 1800s. He is giving comfort to bigots who want to 'take our country back' with racial violence. He is fueling the hate that allegedly drove James Alex Fields Jr. to plow his car into a crowd, killing Heather Heyer and injuring 19 others. He doesn’t see how doing these things is tearing the country apart. And he doesn’t care. Rather than a reflection of our better selves, Trump is a cancer on the presidency."

And a cancer on the Republican Party-- not that they don't deserve it. Last week Kira Lerner, writing for ThinkProgress, noted that white supremacists and neo-Nazis are running for office as Republicans and asked if the GOP will continue to stay silent, the way it did when Trump ran for president.

When KKK wizard David Duke ran for a Metairie state House seat in Louisiana in 1988, both George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan endorsed his primary opponent-- but Metairie Republicans elected Duke to the seat, 8,459 (50.7%) to 8,232 (49.3%). Two years later he was the Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate and former Governor David Treen (R) equated his platform with "garbage... I think he is bad for our party because of his espousal of Nazism and racial superiority." Duke was defeated by incumbent Democratic Senator J. Bennett Johnson 752,902 (53.93%) to 607,391 (43.51%). The following year, Duke ran for governor, again, as the Republican candidate and claiming to be the spokesman for the white majority. Then-president George H.W. Bush denounced him as a charlatan and a racist and opposed his candidacy against Democrat Edwin Edwards. Edwards won 1,057,031 (61.2%) to 671,009 (38.8%) but Duke was delighted since he won 55% of Louisiana's white vote.

3 days after Charlottesville neo-Nazi freak Augustus Sol Invictus who was scheduled to speak at the Unite the Right rally there, announced he is running for the Republican nomination to take on U.S. Senator Bill Nelson in Florida. Elizabeth Warren has a Nazi Republican opponent as well.

The prospect of neo-Nazis representing the GOP raises serious constitutional questions for political parties, who will have to decide whether to allow controversial figures to appear on their primary ballots. And with a president in the White House who has not only fanned the flames of white supremacists, but effectively sided with them in the wake of the Charlottesville violence, establishment Republican leaders will have to calculate if allowing extreme figures to appear on their ballots causes more harm than good.

For many Republicans, the potential to alienate a small group of extreme voters within the party while distancing itself from hateful rhetoric, will be worth the effort. Veteran GOP operative Mark Corallo told ThinkProgress that the party should do everything it can to disassociate with candidates like Invictus.

“If there is any legal way to prevent a racist from appearing on the ballot, then they should absolutely use all legal means to prevent it,” he said. “And if the party rules need to be changed to prevent racists, neo-Nazis, and other vile human beings of that ilk from appearing on the ballot then they should be changed immediately.”

Corallo, who until recently served as a spokesperson for Trump’s personal attorney Marc Kasowitz and had been handling the White House’s defense in the Russia investigation, said that disassociating should be a priority for the GOP.

“Simply put, they should formally disassociate the party from the haters,” he said. “Furthermore they should make it clear that anyone who identifies himself as a Republican and hold those vile racist views is not a Republican and will not only be deprived of support but will be condemned in the harshest terms by the Republican Party.”

...A recent poll found that 64 percent of Republicans agree with President Trump that “both sides” share the fault for the violence in Charlottesville. And as of June, 72 percent of Republicans approve of the president who this week refused to denounce the neo-Nazis who marched in Charlottesville holding torches and chanting: “Jews will not replace us.”

...The GOP could have a hard time disavowing someone like Invictus, when the party is currently led by Trump and is filled with lawmakers who also frequently make appeals to the party’s racist base, without necessarily describing themselves as white nationalists. Rep. Steve King (R-IA) sent a tweet in March-- “We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies.”-- that was so popular with white supremacists, they dubbed him “King Steve.”

“Steve King is basically an open white nationalist at this point,” Andrew Anglin, the founder of the neo-Nazi website Daily Stormer, wrote at the time.

Iowa GOP chairman Jeff Kaufmann responded by claiming that he does not agree with King’s statement. But Kaufmann did not go as far as to say that he would try to prevent King from representing Iowa Republicans in the future. Instead, Kauffman reserved his harshest words for Duke, who praised King’s tweet. “His words and sentiments are absolute garbage,” the GOP chair said about Duke. “He is not welcome in our wonderful state.”

Don't expect Trump to disassociate the GOP from white supremacists and Nazis. Instead, expect him to encourage more of them, like Kelli Ward, in Arizona to take over the party and defeat mainstream conservatives like Jeff Flake. Over the weekend, Peter Wehner, writing for the NY Times in an OpEd entitled Behold Our 'Child King', noted that "Republican lawmakers have seen the Trump disaster coming for a while now. They simply have no clue what to do about it... The political problem facing Republicans is that Mr. Trump’s presidency is a wreck. His agenda is dead in the water. A special counsel is overseeing an investigation of his campaign. The West Wing is dysfunctional. And President Trump is deeply unpopular with most Americans."

A new Washington Post-ABC News poll illustrates the dilemma Republican politicians face. It found that 28 percent of polled voters say they approved of Mr. Trump’s response to Charlottesville. But among Republican voters, the figure was 62 percent, while 72 percent of conservative Republicans approved.

The more offensive Mr. Trump is to the rest of America, the more popular he becomes with his core supporters. One policy example: At a recent rally in Phoenix, the president said he was willing to shut down the government over the question of funding for a border wall, which most of his base favors but only about a third of all Americans want.

Much of this mess is of the Republican Party’s own making. Let’s not forget that Mr. Trump’s political rise began with his promulgation of the racist conspiracy theory that President Obama was not a natural-born American citizen. The Trump presidency is the result of years of destructive mental habits and moral decay. So there’s no easy solution for responsible Republicans. But there is a step they have to take.

They need to accept, finally, the reality-- evident from the moment he declared his candidacy-- that Mr. Trump is unfit to govern. He will prove unable to salvage his presidency. As the failures pile up, he’ll act in an even more erratic fashion.

The mental hurdle Republicans have to clear is that in important respects the interests of the Republican Party and those of Donald Trump no longer align. The party has to highlight ways in which it can separate itself from the president.

So far the response of many Republican leaders to Mr. Trump’s offenses has been silence or at most veiled, timid criticism. The effect is to rile up Trump supporters and Mr. Trump himself without rallying opposition to him. It’s the worst of all worlds.

What’s required now is a comprehensive, consistent case by Republican leaders at the state and national levels that signals their opposition to the moral ugliness and intellectual incoherence of Mr. Trump. Rather than standing by the president, they should consider themselves liberated and offer a constructive, humane and appealing alternative to him. They need to think in terms of a shadow government during the Trump era, with the elevation of alternative leaders on a range of matters.

This approach involves risk and may not work. It will certainly provoke an angry response from the Breitbart-alt-right-talk-radio part of the party. So be it. Republicans who don’t share Mr. Trump’s approach have to hope that his imploding presidency has created an opening to offer a profoundly different vision of America, one that is based on opportunity, openness, mobility and inclusion.

This requires a new intellectual infrastructure to address what may prove to be one of the largest economic disruptions in history. People in positions of influence need to make arguments on behalf of principles and ideas that have for too long gone undefended. They must appeal to moral idealism. And the party needs leaders who will fight with as much passionate intensity for their cause as Mr. Trump fights for his-- which is simply himself. There’s no shortcut to forging a separate Republican identity during the Trump presidency. Half-measures and fainthearted opposition are certain to fail.

If Republicans need more encouragement to break with Mr. Trump, they might note that the president, who has no institutional or party loyalty, is positioning himself as a critic not just of Democrats but also of Republicans. During his rally in Arizona, he went out of his way to attack both of that state’s Republican senators, including one battling brain cancer. He followed that up with tweets attacking the House speaker, Paul D. Ryan, the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, and other Republican lawmakers.

A confrontation is inevitable. The alternative is to continue to further tie the fate and the reputation of the Republican Party to a president who seems destined for epic failure and whose words stir the hearts of white supremacists.

We are well past the point where equivocations are defensible, and we’re nearly past the point where a moral reconstitution is possible. The damage Mr. Trump has inflicted on the Republican Party is already enormous. If the party doesn’t make a clean break with him, it will be generational.