(The following is an email, lightly edited, that I sent recently to a good friend of mine; thought I’d share it here.)
You'll remember what I told you when Trump announced: that I welcomed his entry into the race, because he was going to all but scream what the rest of us have noticed Republican candidates - until now - had only been muttering sotto voce. From the moment he referenced Mexican drug dealers and rapists in his very opening announcement, it was clear that Trump’s campaign was going to be about pandering to the very worst elements of the electorate: the racists, the xenophobes, the misogynists, the anti-Muslims, the proudly ignorant. (Remember his victory speech after the Nevada caucuses? "I love the poorly educated!")
Like almost everybody, I bought into the conventional wisdom that Trump had no chance of actually winning the Republican nomination and, in hindsight, I should more fully have had the courage of my convictions. For years, left-leaning political observers have watched and noticed aloud that the Republican party has been morphing itself into the party of old, reactionary, bigoted, white people - and especially old, reactionary, bigoted white men. Of course, Republican elites resolutely opposed that description. "Oh no," they asserted, "people vote for us because we believe in limited government, a strong military, low taxes, and family values. Despite what you see with your own eyes, we're not a party of intolerables. Those people who say crazy, hateful things out loud are only fringe characters, they don't represent what the GOP is really about."
I welcomed Trump's entry into the race because - while I still believed he couldn't actually secure the nomination - I thought he would make clear exactly how nutty and plain mean so many GOP voters have become in recent years. "Let's have this fight," I told you, "because there're more of us than there are of them. Let's have this argument out in the open and make sure these terrible, terrible people lose publicly."
But what in fact happened was more than that. Trump exposed the GOP's ostensible platform for the sham it is. Limited government? Hell no! Trump's going to beef that sucker up, expand social security and institute a new deportation force to round up the brown people. Military intervention and global peacekeeping? Hell no! Trump's going to use our military only to extort concessions from other nations. Family values? Hell, no! Trump's a thrice-married philanderer who openly muses about fucking his own daughter, has absolutely no grasp of even the most basic Christian tenets, and proudly claims that he has never committed even a single act for which he has felt the need to seek forgiveness.
And Republican voters just. don't. care. About any of it. The only thing the Republican base (and I use that word in its every sense) care about - the only thing - is that Trump is a bully who promises to beat the shit out of anybody they don't like. And the people they don't like are, again, black people, brown people, immigrants, non-Christians, foreigners, and even women . . . anybody who isn't exactly the old, white men who - until Obama, whose election deranged them with hate and rage - had always occupied the White House.
And now, immediately following the release of a video in which Trump openly boasts about sexually assaulting women because - as a "star" - it is his right and privilege to do so, this has been made absolutely clear. As Josh Marshall details in the article at the link below, Republican elites may now be claiming that this is just a bridge too far, a straw too heavy . . . but Republican voters are demanding that their leaders stand. with. Trump.
What we are watching is a culture war that is playing out in a single political party. Republican leaders and elected officials - all of 'em relative sophisticates, college-educated, and rich - find Trump appalling. But the Republican base think Trump is just the guy for them. When the GOP base rails against "the Establishment" and "the elite," they are railing also against their own political leaders, and for exactly the same reason: those leaders are also people with a bit of book learnin' who (with maybe a little help) could find Ethiopia on a map, and who take pains to not say out loud that the only people who really count are white guys. Those GOP leaders ain't "real 'Mericans" like us, the base thinks, but Donald Trump is!
Hillary Clinton got at least one thing wrong this past month. She said that only roughly "one-half" of Trump's voters belong in the "basket of deplorables." According to the polling cited by Josh Marshall, that number is actually much, much higher.
Here is the link to Marshall’s article: talkingpointsmemo.com/...