The Cowardice of the Republican Candidates
Give Donald Trump this: He has taught Americans something about the candidates he’s running against. He has exposed many of them as political cowards.
.. Yet he didn’t call Trump’s proposals immoral or bigoted, since that might offend Trump’s nativist base. Instead, Bush declared: “Mr. Trump’s plans are not grounded in conservative principles. His proposal is unrealistic. It would cost hundreds of billions of dollars.” In other words, demonizing and rounding up undocumented Mexican immigrants is fine, so long as it’s done cheap.
.. John Dickerson asked Bush about a statement by one of Bush’s advisers that Trump’s plan for registering Muslims is “fascist.” Bush ignored the question. Instead he called Trump “uninformed,” “wrong on Syria,” and “not a serious leader.” The strategy was clear: Avoid defending the rights of Muslim Americans, since there’s little market for that among GOP primary voters. Instead, call Trump a lightweight and insufficiently hawkish, and therefore somehow get to his right.
.. So when the would-be leader of your country scapegoats and threatens its most vulnerable groups, the correct response is to “take a deep breath” because such threats will never be carried out?
.. There’s an irony here. When it comes to Vladimir Putin, ISIS, and Iran, the GOP candidates love denouncing “appeasement.” Yet when it comes to Trump, appeasement is their core strategy. They’re desperate to stop him. But they won’t call him a demagogue or a bigot or worse than Hillary Clinton, because that entails political risk.