I don’t listen to radio a whole lot, living in NYC I rarely drive. But I did tune into a show called Radio Times on WHYY in Southern NJ. Their guests for the second part of the show today were Mona Charen (National Review) and Rebecca Traister (New York Magazine).
The conservative columnist is not a Trump supporter, is very articulate in her opposition to Trump, she called this “the worst political year in my life”, Trump a buffoon and is also no longer a Republican. I appreciated her commentary, and to give you a taste, she wrote this back in August:
A mob of self-styled “conservative” activists, jumped-up talk-radio and TV hosts, Republican-party apparatchiks (oh does that word have new relevance), a plurality of primary voters, and spineless elected officials across the fruited plain have signed on with a repellent demagogue who will destroy the party at its moment of maximum opportunity. [...]
Trump is a pathogen. A man who heedlessly promotes conspiracy theories (vaccines cause autism, Obama was born in Kenya, Bush lied us into war in Iraq, Rafael Cruz was caught up in the JFK assassination), is either not fully sane or at least indifferent to the demoralizing effect that such lies have on our social cohesion. A man whose confidence is so shaky that he must attest to his own intelligence, malign even the most insignificant critic, scapegoat minorities, and threaten the free press is to be pitied, maybe, but not trusted with power. He is very, very comfortable stoking mobs and threatening violence. His warning that there would be riots in Cleveland if he failed to get the nomination — to cite just one of the thousands of ways he has transgressed basic norms this year — ought to have been enough to activate the antibodies of a healthy electorate. Every single Republican with influence, from the local sheriff to the speaker of the House, at every stage of this process, should have stood up on his hind legs and denounced this fraud (where are his tax returns, again?), condemned his ugly methods, and scorned his flood of lies. Every Republican should have lined up for Judge Curiel. Chris Christie’s endorsement was the first tablespoon of sewage. Jeff Sessions’s was the second. The list of defilers is too long to itemize now. RIP GOP.
But quite remarkably, over the course of the radio show, she also found a way to assign blame for the Trump phenomenon on everything else under the sun. Democrats, the media, black voters are apparently also to blame for the rise of Trump. The Republican party, and the conservative movement, come off lightly in contrast, no need for them to look in the mirror at itself.
It’s Democrats fault for pointing out how little care Mitt Romney showed for those hurt by his policies. See, because you didn’t pick Mittens, you ended up with Trump, it’s your fault.
The media is also to blame, for it’s “bias” and for apparently for not breaking negative stories on Trump earlier. Along with being devious and scheming with Democrats, the media are apparently too naive and trusting. That’s why they failed to realize the Republican party was about to be captured by a white supremacist demagogue. Seriously, why didn’t the media save the Republican party from itself, it’s clearly not something we should expect Republican officials and voters to do, they have no agency at all.
Lastly, black voters are also to blame for being immune to Mitt’s “most magnificent” speech at the NAACP. Why, oh why, didn’t they simply understand that Mitt Romney’s would have been better for “black America than the policies Democrats were peddling”, and that he was simply trying to save them from the scourge of “free stuff”. Mona seemed completely unaware that Mitt’s statement was just a genteel form of Trump’s oft-repeated statement that he would be “Great for the Blacks”.
And it isn’t just this columnist, several RNC members apparently agree with Trump that the election is rigged. Not one single prominent Republican has openly admitted that the GOP’s decades long coddling of a racist, xenophobic far right is responsible for the rise of Trump. They refuse to admit that their views and Trump’s don’t diverge in content, only in presentation. When backed into a corner, they will, as this columnist did, say Trump’s political stances are closer to a Democrat’s and aren’t conservatism.
Well, the fact is that Donald Trump wouldn’t have stood a snowball’s chance in hell of winning the Democratic primary. But he did win the Republican primary fair and square, defeating a “deep bench” of accomplished Republicans.
It’s time for conservatives and Republicans to take some personal responsibility for what their party and movement have produced. I suspect they won’t though, so we can add “personal responsibility” to the long list of principles the GOP and conservatives have loudly espoused for political benefit, but which in reality mean nothing to them.