In just the past few weeks, Donald Trump
has attacked the parents of a fallen American soldier; said that Barack Obama
and Hillary Clinton were the literal founders of ISIS; initially refused to endorse
Paul Ryan and John McCain for reelection; seemed to encourage violence against
the Democratic presidential nominee; and revived his accusations from May that
Ted Cruz’s father was somehow involved in the JFK assassination. I know this is
not an exhaustive list, but the number of asinine statements Trump is able to
spit out on a daily basis make such a list nearly impossible.
Republicans have dutifully denounced
each of these statements. But while an increasing number of party members,
including members of Congress, disavow Trump entirely, party leadership (Reince
Priebus, Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, et al) continue to support the man
himself.
What more could Trump possibly do to
change that? He’s acting like a child testing his parents’ limits, trying to
see how much he can get away with before he gets punished. And he has yet to
find any such boundary, which only encourages him further.
He’s insulted military families,
Mexicans, POWs, women, and a disabled reporter, and made statements that can
only objectively described as racist. While party leadership has studiously
distanced themselves from each of these in turn, at what point do they look
beyond the words to the person who has actually said all this? They, along with
every other person in the country, know that if a Democratic nominee was saying
exactly the same things as Trump, they would be denouncing that person on a
daily basis.
If Chairman Priebus, Speaker Ryan, and
the rest of the Republican leadership still want themselves and the other
members of the party to be respected as people of integrity, they need to
figure out at what point they will say, “Enough is enough.”
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