The Republican Party’s Internecine Fights Spill Into the Open
Yet on Saturday, all that happened! Trump accused George W. Bush of lying about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Marco Rubio accused Ted Cruz of lying, a charge Cruz rejected as “knowingly false.” Trump refused to retreat from a long-ago television interview calling for George W. Bush’s impeachment.
.. For a decade and a half, Republicans have stifled internal debates about the George W. Bush presidency. They have preserved a more or less common front, by the more or less agreed upon device of not looking backward, not talking candidly, and focusing all their accumulated anger on the figure of Obama. The Trump candidacy has smashed all those coping mechanisms. Everything that was suppressed has been exposed, everything that went unsaid is being shouted aloud—and all before a jeering live audience, as angry itself as any of the angry men on the platform. Is this a functional political party? Is this an organization readying itself to govern? Or is it one more—most spectacular—show of self-evisceration by a party that has been bleeding on the inside for a decade and longer?