Column: How the GOP lit itself on fire
The Darwin Awards is a popular website that “commemorates individuals who protect our gene pool by making the ultimate sacrifice of their own lives. Darwin Award winners eliminate themselves in an extraordinarily idiotic manner, thereby improving our species’ chances of long-term survival.” I’d like to nominate a certain political party for one. It should win hands down.
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Its story is true—as much a part of our reality as the sky and the stars. The voters that make up the party are, as the rules stipulate, “capable of sound judgment.” By supporting the least qualified, least knowledgeable, most unsuited major-party nominee for president in history, they are engaged in an “astounding misapplication of judgment.” Every week that Donald Trump remains the Republican nominee, the party comes closer to removing itself from the presidential gene pool. Self-selection is at work here. Trump’s supporters are choosing their party’s demise.
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… If Republican voters had nominated a typical candidate, a governor or former governor who had won office in a big state by straddling the center and the right, that man would be ahead of Hillary Clinton right now. But instead the voters went for Trump, who has never run for nor held office, dodged the draft, and spent the last year insulting Mexicans, P.O.W.s, women, the disabled, Muslims, you name it, while saying George W. Bush lied us into war with Iraq and implying Ted Cruz’s dad had a hand in the Kennedy assassination. Then there was the part where he bragged about his genitals before ranting that he would order soldiers to commit war crimes and “If I say do it, they’re going to do it.” This week he cast the troops in Iraq as thieves, threw his support behind an unconstitutional proposal to deny Second Amendment rights to citizens on the no fly list, invited Kim Jong Un to Washington, hinted that President Obama supported ISIS, denied press credentials to the Washington Post after the paper reported this insinuation, and then turned around and tweeted that a Breitbart.com article proved he was right about Obama all along.
This is not a good man. This is not a stable man. It is in the self-interest of no rational person to have him near the situation room. So it does not come as a surprise to see support for Donald Trump collapsing in the Real Clear Politics poll average. Hillary Clinton now leads him by about six points. His unfavorable rating in the ABC News / Washington Post poll is up to 70 percent, a record high. The election isn’t until November 8. Where will Trump’s unfavorable rating be then? 85 percent? 90? He’ll make the record books all right—as the most reviled nominee in U.S. history.
A majority of voters told CBS that Hillary Clinton would win the presidency. An analysis of 11 battleground states conducted by Politico has Clinton winning 8 of them. The GOP as a whole has a favorable rating of only 32 percent, the lowest number since Bloomberg started polling in 2009. Maryland governor Larry Hogan, one of the most popular officials in the country, said he would not vote for the nominee of his party. The Reuters poll has the Democrats leading the Republicans in the congressional generic ballot by 11 points. In recent days Trump has hired a pollster for indigo-blue New York and traveled to Georgia, Texas, and Arizona, even though Ohio, Virginia, and Florida will decide the election. Next week Trump plans to travel to Scotland—not to meet with foreign dignitaries but to reopen one of his golf resorts. He knows nothing, has done nothing but promote himself for 30 years, and deserves nothing. And he’s not going to change. Seventy year olds do not change.
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What is most remarkable is that the television advertising is beside the point. It is Donald Trump who has done the Democrats’ work for them, defining himself in the most negative terms through an unending series of inane, ludicrous, and deranged comments. It’s not the media, the party elite, the Democrats sabotaging Donald Trump. It’s Trump. This is self-immolation on an epic scale.
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Trump supporters will tell me that I am paying too much attention to the polls, even though they fetishized the same polls throughout the primary. They are wrong. Any serious campaign analyst looks at the polls. It is mid-June, Clinton has had a consistent lead that is beginning to widen. What is likely to change the trajectory of this race? The terror attack in Florida did not change it. Whatever bounce Trump gets from the convention will dissipate by October. The debate—and there may be only one—is unlikely to move the needle in his direction. He’ll probably be able to hold himself together for about 35 minutes, then the moderator or Clinton will say something and he’ll let himself go, ranting about Monica Lewinsky and how Mitt Romney is a choke artist and all the people Hillary has murdered. And when we are in late October, and Trump is still behind, his supporters will dismiss the polls as skewed, as phony. And when Trump loses, his cheerleaders in talk radio and on the Internet won’t accept a smidgen of responsibility, but will blame the neocons and the media and the Republican establishment for not doing more to help a lunatic become president.
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How cathartic it is to give voice to your fury, to wallow in self-righteousness, in helplessness, in self-serving self-pity. It’s what one expects of teenagers, artists, bloggers, pajama boys—immature, peevish, radical, self-destructive behavior. If that is how Republican voters would like to end their days, in a defensive posture of suspicion and loathing of this big crazy wonderful country that has made them literally the wealthiest and most entitled generation of human beings in the history of the world, well, that’s their right as Americans, I suppose. Best of luck. The Darwin Award will be ready for you November 9.
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Great @continetti: "Trump has done the Democrats’ work for them…This is self-immolation on an epic scale."https://t.co/gtENRL5Xnm
— Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) June 17, 2016
The thought of Hillary as president is humiliating. The thought of voting for Trump makes me want to vomit and the thought of him as president is alarming. This guy is an idiot. Anybody with any self-respect would step back and own up to the fact that he is not fit for the office. I cannot understand how any of the conservatives in his army can still stay on this train. I will never read Jeffrey Lord again. I will never listen to Palin or Phyllis Schafly again. Jeff Sessions has ruined his own reputation and had many opportunities to stop Trump, get him to back off some of this insanity, but has done nothing. And, as this article has stated, it will affect a LOT of down party voting. This is a nightmare unfolding. America is going to move a lot more than just a little more socialist. This will be the nail in that coffin of death. Hillary said back in the 90s that Marxism just hasn’t been done right yet, so I expect that we will have Csarina Hillary to show us the better way.I wonder how many of us will survive to 2020? This is not a joke, either.
We’d better get on our knees and start acting like there is a God in Heaven, start praying like there is no tomorrow, and repenting of our national sins as well as out own. It is the ONLY way. It is our ONLY salvation.
Pray for righteousness to be restored and for the peace of Jerusalem
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