Trump and the Republican Dilemma

Two weeks of the candidate’s invective inspired a number of G.O.P. officials to retract their support for his campaign. But where will they go?

But, in the past two weeks, Trump has made things easier for certain Republicans: those elected officials still seeking what Senator Lindsey Graham has called an “off-ramp,” by which they can justify to the most partisan of their constituents and colleagues renouncing the Party’s nominee.
.. And those defections came before Trump told a crowd in Wilmington, North Carolina, that if Hillary Clinton won the election and “gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although, the Second Amendment people—maybe there is.” Suddenly, this was the week when Republicans had to decide whether they would stick by a nominee who, indirectly but unmistakably, had mooted nullifying election results at gunpoint.
.. On Thursday, Trump told CNBC that only the “haters” would think he wanted Hillary Clinton dead. Hate, though, is precisely what he has worked to evoke in his supporters.
.. For some time, commentators have been observing that violence can emerge from the sort of rhetoric that swirls around Trump, and drawing parallels to the angry exchanges in Israel in the days leading up to the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, in 1995.
.. By the end of the week, however, none of the remaining forty-eight Senate Republicans had followed her.
.. he did win the nomination. Others have, perhaps without thinking about it much, let a patina of hints about Obama’s citizenship and the undesirability of immigrants and of religious and ethnic minorities build up until it has become hard to tell what the Republican Party looked like without it. And that has made things easy for Donald Trump.

RNC considers cutting cash to Trump

GOP officials lay the groundwork to blame their nominee if Clinton wins.

Publicly, Republican Party officials continue to stand by Donald Trump. Privately, at the highest levels, party leaders have started talking about cutting off support to Trump in October and redirecting cash to save endangered congressional majorities.

.. Since the Cleveland convention, top party officials have been quietly making the case to political journalists, donors and GOP operatives that the Republican National Committee has done more to help Trump than it did to support its 2012 nominee Mitt Romney, and that therefore Trump has only himself and his campaign to blame for his precipitous slide in the polls, according to people who have spoken with Republican leadership.

Dozens of Republicans to urge RNC to cut off funds for Trump

The letter ticks off a series of Trump actions that they believe have “alienated millions of voters of all parties,” including, attacking Gold Star families, positive comments about violent foreign leaders and encouraging Russia to find Clinton’s lost emails.

“Those recent outrages have built on his campaign of anger and exclusion, during which he has mocked and offended millions of voters, including the disabled, women, Muslims, immigrants, and minorities,” the letter states. “He also has shown dangerous authoritarian tendencies, including threats to ban an entire religion from entering the country, order the military to break the law by torturing prisoners, kill the families of suspected terrorists, track law-abiding Muslim citizens in databases, and use executive orders to implement other illegal and unconstitutional measures.”

We may be about to get a wave of Republicans deserting Donald Trump’s sinking ship

  • Fifty prominent national security officials who held positions in previous Republican administrations released a letter proclaiming their opposition to Trump, saying, “We are convinced that in the Oval Office, he would be the most reckless President in American history.”
  • Former CIA director Michael Morell, who served under both Republican and Democratic presidents, endorsed Clinton, saying “Donald J. Trump is not only unqualified for the job, but he may well pose a threat to our national security.”

.. No one wants to be a lonely voice going against the consensus of his or her party, but once there’s a critical mass of defectors, it becomes much less socially and politically threatening to take that stand. Instead of isolating yourself by defecting, you’d be joining a group, and one whose members don’t see themselves as having abandoned the party they love.

.. Republican officials may start asking themselves not just “How are voters going to react if I don’t stand behind our nominee?” but “How am I going to look if so many other Republicans defected but I didn’t? Are voters going to think I was cowardly and unprincipled?”

.. Up until now, elected officials making this calculation would wonder what would happen if they defected and Trump won. Would they get a primary challenge from the right? Would the Trump administration shut them out?

.. Trump loses, the party descends into recriminations, and who comes out looking good? It might well be those who refused to back him, and did so as early as possible.

.. those who would wind up looking the worst would be people like Marco Rubio or Rick Perry, who made dark warnings about what a disaster Trump would be for both for the party and the country, and then came out and gave him their hearty endorsements anyway.

.. Maybe if he comes up with a demeaning nickname for Susan Collins, that’ll do the trick.