Words No Longer Matter
But Cruz is now backing a man for the nation’s highest office that he considers to be a liar, a coward, and amoral. Those are charges you don’t just take back or minimize, and to do so reinforces the cynicism that many voters have about the political process.
Honor Thy Father?
.. Cruz had a pretty good reason for calling Trump all those things back in the spring: Trump ran an astonishingly dirty campaign against him!
.. Finally, Trump spread a rumor, based off a grainy photo in the National Enquirer, that Cruz’s father Rafael was involved in the Kennedy assassination—and he continued raising it the day after he accepted the Republican nomination for president.
Brand Ruination
.. Cruz has worked diligently over the years to forge a political identity that can be summed up thusly: He is a conservative who fights on principle, whether or not that accords with the wishes of his party’s leadership. By bowing down to a man he has attacked so harshly, Cruz significantly dilutes that brand.
.. Cruz now leaves Ohio Governor John Kasich as perhaps the most Trump prominent holdout who is eyeing another White House bid in four years.
What About Cleveland?
.. If he was planning to honor his commitment to support the Republican nominee, why did he make a dramatic show of snubbing Trump at the convention in Cleveland
Promises, Promises (Trump Doesn’t Keep ’Em)
.. The policy reasons that Cruz cites are all based on promises Trump has made, including his two separate lists of potential Supreme Court appointments. Yet as Cruz himself has pointed out, Trump is never more slippery than when it comes to policy.
Mr. Ryan, Your Views on Donald Trump? Next Question, Please
The House speaker, Paul D. Ryan, has expressed no particular opinion on the stop-and-frisk police tactics advocated this week by Donald J. Trump. He does not have any certain thoughts about Mr. Trump’s repeated praise of Vladimir V. Putin. He sort of suggested that Mr. Trump should release his tax returns, but what he really meant, it seems, is that candidates in general should do so. Then again, he said that he would “defer” to Mr. Trump on the decision.
.. Since Congress returned from its seven-week recess this month, Mr. Ryan has largely refused to answer any question about Mr. Trump, from his policy proposals and campaign antics to his latest controversial statements.
.. This is in stark contrast to Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, who wasted no time in endorsing Mr. Trump and has maintained his support at roughly the temperature of a cup of day-old Earl Grey tea, rarely criticizing even Mr. Trump’s most incendiary remarks.
Mike Pence Is Rebuffed as He Tries to Rally G.O.P. Leaders Over ‘Deplorables’
But Mr. Pence struggled to press the attack: In separate news conferences, House and Senate Republican leaders declined to join Mr. Pence, the Indiana governor and vice-presidential nominee, in rebuking Mrs. Clinton over her remark.
.. Mr. Lee pressed the governor on his reluctance to denounce Mr. Duke and the so-called alt-right movement more explicitly, stressing “that Republicans must identify David Duke’s racism as deplorable,” according to Conn Carroll, a spokesman for Mr. Lee.
.. Mr. McCain said Mr. Trump’s embrace of the autocratic ruler was unacceptable, according to a Republican official present who also insisted on anonymity.
Mr. Pence insisted that he and Mr. Trump were trying to belittle President Obama rather than to laud Mr. Putin.
.. Mr. Pence said Mr. Trump behaved differently in private, and even had a spiritual side.
.. Congressional Republicans said they were pleased that the presidential race was tightening and that Mr. Trump appeared more viable, partly because their own prospects depend on his being competitive enough that Republicans still bother to vote.
.. Republicans on Capitol Hill have their own agenda and intend to run their campaigns apart from Mr. Trump — not as a unified ticket.
.. “The country would probably be more pleased with the vice-presidential candidates than the two candidates at the top,” Mr. Curbelo said with a grin.
The Paranoid Style in American Politics Is Back
.. historian Richard Hofstadter famously described in 1964 as “The Paranoid Style in American Politics”:
In fact, the idea of the paranoid style as a force in politics would have little contemporary relevance or historical value if it were applied only to men with profoundly disturbed minds. It is the use of paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people that makes the phenomenon significant.
The paranoia of the Trump campaign has found expression in the accusation that the Republican establishment in the primaries and now Hillary Clinton and her allies in the general election are committed to rigging the election to prevent Trump’s rightful accession to the White House.
.. Hofstadter describes the paranoid style as
made up of certain preoccupations and fantasies: the megalomaniac view of oneself as the Elect, wholly good, abominably persecuted, yet assured of ultimate triumph; the attribution of gigantic and demonic powers to the adversary.
.. Trump’s strongest supporters do in fact feel abominably persecuted. They are unlikely to fade away gracefully.
.. Roger Stone, a Trump confidant, shared his own thinking with Milo Yiannopoulos of Breitbart News on July 29:
I think we have widespread voter fraud, but the first thing that Trump needs to do is begin talking about it constantly.
.. Stone’s advice was that Trump should say,
I am leading in Florida. The polls all show it. If I lose Florida, we will know that there’s voter fraud. If there’s voter fraud, this election will be illegitimate, the election of the winner will be illegitimate, we will have a constitutional crisis, widespread civil disobedience, and the government will no longer be the government.
.. The poll found that 56 percent of Trump supporters believed the election would be rigged. Among all voters, 34 percent predicted a rigged election; 60 percent rejected the notion.
.. Part of the reason that our nation has been relatively free of political violence is that losers of contests have nearly always accepted their loss and opposed the victor through legitimate means, such as challenging them in future elections or working against their agenda in Congress. The 2000 election was very close and obviously very controversial, but Al Gore nonetheless conceded after the Supreme Court’s ruling. Were Trump and his supporters to continue to argue that the election had been stolen from them, it would mean that they reject nonviolent solutions to political differences. It could jeopardize future elections, undermine the legitimacy of the federal government, and create an environment in which political violence becomes more likely.
.. the so called alt-right — white nationalists and hard-line opponents of immigration who oppose multiculturalism and defend a particular vision of western values — has become an influential force in politics.
.. He’s certainly creating a movement that will continue independently of him even if he does fold at some point.
.. Hans Noel, a political scientist at Georgetown .. points to the problems a narrow Trump loss could pose for the Republican Party
.. The conviction that Democrats and the Washington establishment will rig the election in Clinton’s favor is by no means limited to the alt-right. Newt Gingrich, the former House Speaker, and Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, have both promoted the idea.
“There’s a long tradition on the part of Democratic machines of trying to steal elections,” Gingrich told Sean Hannity on Fox News on Aug. 2:
I mean, if you assume that she is a crook, as he says, if you assume that she lies, as he says, why would you expect her to have an honest election?
.. Fifty-two years ago, writing in the year of the Johnson-Goldwater election, Hofstadter proved remarkably prescient: the right wing, he argued,
feels dispossessed: America has been largely taken away from them and their kind, though they are determined to try to repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion.
.. The situation becomes worse when the representatives of a particular social interest — perhaps because of the very unrealistic and unrealizable nature of its demands — are shut out of the political process. Having no access to political bargaining or the making of decisions, they find their original conception that the world of power is sinister and malicious fully confirmed. They see only the consequences of power — and this through distorting lenses — and have no chance to observe its actual machinery.