Is Trump Losing the GOP?
Never before have so many leading Republican figures questioned the nominee’s basic fitness for office.
In 1800, the first genuinely competitive election, allies of Vice President Thomas Jefferson said President John Adams possessed a “hideous hermaphroditical character, which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman.” For his part, Jefferson was labeled “a mean-spirited, low-lived fellow, the son of a half-breed Indian squaw, sired by a Virginia mulatto father”—not to mention an “atheist” and “whoremaster.”
.. The hard questions about the character and temperament of the presumptive Republican nominee are coming from within his own party, at precisely the time when the most important piece of business for a nominee is consolidation.
.. He’s implying something else: that Trump would not listen to his military, that he’d turn a diplomatic dispute into a casus belli; that he is not to be trusted with the power of the presidency not because of what he thinks, but because of how he behaves.
.. It is rooted in the idea that Trump has the instincts of a narcissistic bully, unable to even imagine that anyone might have a reasonable basis for disagreeing with him
.. What is haunting a significant number of Republicans is that they are on the verge of putting someone in the Oval Office whose character and temperament make him unfit for the job.
.. Unlike so many in the GOP base, who see in Trump’s behavior a fearless willingness to take on a corrupt political system, these Republicans are seeing signs that he is a dangerous figure, not for what he thinks, but for who he is. And no amount of speeches read from a Teleprompter reciting anodyne pieties is likely to change that.