Donald J. Trump is furious. He is enraged. In recent days, he’s been exposed as a self confessed sexual predator. Hundreds of Republicans have withdrawn their endorsements for him.
And when Donald J. Trump becomes enraged, he breaks out of all norms of civility and decency or party loyalty, standards which he calls shackles. And he lets loose.
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For Republicans, this means a potential Trumpocaplyse which would result in a total “electoral college wipe out, losing the White House, the Senate and the House.”
Donald Trump is blowing up the Republican Party
Tuesday marks four weeks until the 2016 election. And the Republican presidential nominee is in the midst of blowing up his own party.
The news came — as it so often does with Donald Trump — via Twitter.
Let's stop for a second. This is the Republican presidential nominee. Attacking his own party. Promising to teach his party leaders a lesson. Pledging to take the “shackles off.”
I've spent the better part of the last two decades covering politics — day in and day out. And, I can say without hesitation I have NEVER seen anything close to this. And I expect I never will again.
Republicans knew that this version of Trump — angry, cornered, vengeful, selfish — was always a possibility when they made the decision to line up behind him rather than attempt complicated measures to unseat him at the party convention. Trump had shown his petulance and I'll-just-take-my-ball-and-go-home-ism during the primary season whenever things weren't going his way. He would turn on Republicans who weren't for him, attacking them as losers or out of touch with the party's voters — or both.
But, there was a belief — it appears to be more of a blind hope in retrospect — that Trump could be managed, that he could be brought to heel either by the likes of Speaker Paul D. Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell or by campaign managers Paul Manafort and/or Kellyanne Conway. That Trump could be made to understand that it was about more than him, that the entire party depended on him running a credible and serious campaign.
What we are witnessing is a full implosion of the Republican party all masterminded by none other than Donald J. Trump as he sits in his penthouse at Trump Tower with phone in hand, watching cable news.
Trump is at Trump Tower, per a person close to him. Watching TV, tweeting. With Bannon & others who encourage his anti-estab R sentiment…
- Robert Costa (@costareports) October 11, 2016
In what appears to be the full “Breitbart-ization” of the Trump campaign, one thing is for certain. This is only going to get worse. And it could bring on a full electoral wipe out for the Republicans and Republicans have no one to blame but themselves.
The cowardly GOP has engineered its own suicide
Of the remarkable things we have learned this election year, the most significant is that the current Republican Party is unfit to lead the country. It has failed the greatest test a political leader or party can face, and failed spectacularly. It has abandoned its principles out of a combination of cowardice and opportunism. It has worked to place in the White House the most dangerous threat to U.S. democracy since the Civil War. And perhaps just as revealing, it has in the process engineered its own suicide. Not only has the party refused to save the country, but also it has proved too helpless, too incompetent and too craven even to save itself.
These are the people we’re supposed to put in charge of the House and Senate for another two years? Whom we’re then supposed to rally behind in the battle for the White House in 2020? No. Not this group. We know too much. We know all we need to know