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.