Then every Democrat in the country — not to mention almost every pundit — will say, “You guys were fine with Trump as the nominee when he was a racist, but now that he’s hurting the whole GOP’s chances, he’s suddenly unacceptable?” And there will be some truth to the accusation.
.. There’s not enough space here to recount in any serious detail all of the self-destructive statements and bizarre rabbit holes he spelunked into — from attacking the parents of Captain Humayun Kahn, a soldier who died serving our country, to “jokingly” inviting the Russians to muck about in our elections, to reviving past controversies about Senator Ted Cruz’s father’s alleged complicity in the Kennedy assassination.
And yet GOP establishment leaders stuck with their man — just as they’d stuck with their man when he threw NATO under the bus, and ridiculed our treaty obligations with Japan, and attacked American-born Judge Gonzalo Curiel for an alleged conflict of interest between his professional duties and his Mexican heritage.
.. GOP leaders contemplated pulling the emergency brake on the Trump Train only when the nominee said he wouldn’t endorse Ryan or senators John McCain and Kelly Ayotte. The message was clear: Only his willingness to endanger top Republicans’ reelection was truly unacceptable behavior. Nothing else Trump said or did until then was beyond the pale.
Trump Sees a Monster
Though the candidates themselves made efforts to hide any hurt, Trump’s delay in endorsing them had occasioned cries of dismay from Republican stalwarts, who were aghast that Ryan, in particular, after all that he had done for Trump—including serving as the honorary chair of the Party’s Convention—might have to face an opponent without the benefit of Trump voters and Trump rhetoric. Didn’t Donald owe them that?
.. But as Trump’s policy statements remain outrageous, and his behavior makes his comments about Clinton’s “unhinged” temperament look like a study in projection, balancing that equation demands ever more from G.O.P. politicians. To say that Clinton is more dangerous than Trump requires signing on to a picture of her as a criminal madwoman, and of the political process that produced her nomination as irretrievably corrupted and broken. It leads to diatribes about Benghazi. It means believing in conspiracy theories.
.. A particularly baroque Trumpian line this week was the notion that the election might be stolen from him. The occasion for this was the issuing of court decisions overturning overly restrictive voter-I.D. laws. (Jedediah Purdy has more on that.) In Green Bay, Trump said, “What does that mean? You just keep walking in and voting?” (No.) He added, “So you have to be very careful, very vigilant.” And yet this is also a point where he is in unity with the larger Party, which has long supported measures that are supposedly aimed at insidious attempts to destroy the integrity of the ballot but that serve, really, to suppress the turnout of minority and low-income voters.
.. Trump’s raw material has long been there, in other words—Benghazi, voter fraud, and the perfidy of Clinton were the subjects of fervid nights on Fox News well before this election cycle—but there is less deniability for allegedly respectable Republicans who might want the electoral benefits without the taint... Yet if she wins, by preëmptively questioning the legitimacy of a Clinton Administration they will have made sane governance all the harder.
Trump’s Enablers Will Finally Have to Take a Stand
Some people compare Trump to the great authoritarians of history, but that’s wrong. They were generally disciplined men with grandiose plans. Trump is underdeveloped and unregulated.
He is a slave to his own pride, compelled by a childlike impulse to lash out at anything that threatens his fragile identity... Events are going to force Republicans off the fence. For the past many months Republican leaders have been condemning Trump’s acts while sticking with Trump the man. Trump is making that position ridiculous and shameful. You either stand with a man whose very essence is an insult to basic decency, or you don’t... There comes a time when neutrality and laying low become dishonorable. If you’re not in revolt, you’re in cahoots. When this period and your name are mentioned, decades hence, your grandkids will look away in shame.
Trump tests his limits
But this protracted battle, now entering a fourth day, is testing the limits of his bullying, no-apologies political approach in a way no other self-inflicted wound or crisis has.
.. “I understand they challenged him, but there’s some things you just can’t win and you shouldn’t engage in. [Trump] wanted to change the subject to radical Islamic terrorism — which is what this guy died fighting. He just can’t win the argument and needs to shut up about it, but his personality won’t allow him to do that.
.. Over the weekend, longtime Trump ally Roger Stone suggested that a link between the Khans and the Muslim Brotherhood. (In a later Tweet, Stone issued a “correction” to instead accused Khizr Khan of being linked to a Saudi financier of the Sept. 11 terror attacks.)
.. But by doing this, he’s really hurting himself in his efforts to woo undecided voters.”
.. Trump’s chorus of prominent Republican critics includes few leaders who are ready to rescind their endorsements of him altogether. And they may hold firm until Trump begins to hurt their own reelection chances or standing with constituents.
.. “But if they flat-out reject him, they risk alienating a significant portion of their base.”
.. His pivot, however, was not to attacking Clinton, but rather to a lengthy riff in which he bragged about winning the GOP primary, slammed CNN and spoke angrily about his supposed mistreatment by the media.
He also suggested, for the first time, that November’s election will be “rigged” against him.