Donald Trump and the real Republican Party

The firestorm over leading Republican presidential contender Donald Trump’s ugly comments on John McCain’s military service has been telling. There’s no doubt that what Trump said about McCain was disgusting, particularly coming from somebody who spent his war-eligible years taking deferments. But what does it say about the Republican Party that a guy who has spent over a month saying jaw-droppingly terrible things about Hispanic immigrants has only now, in attacking McCain, gone too far for most of them? This is a political party that has, supposedly, been aggressively courting Hispanic voters, yet when one of its most prominent 2016 candidates essentially builds his campaign pitch around pure anti-Latino racism, his competitors seem completely at a loss as to how they should respond. When that same candidate goes after an old white guy, though, they can’t rush to a microphone to condemn him fast enough.

Well, OK, you say, but McCain is a genuine war hero, and Republicans respect the military so God damn much that they just can’t let an attack on somebody like that slide. And I’m sure that’s the idea the Republican Party wants to project, but it rings a little hollow when you realize that most of the Republican candidates who are tripping over each other to denounce Trump right now have ties to the group that spent most of the 2004 campaign saying equally vicious things about John Kerry’s equally meritorious service record. JEB, naturally, actually praised those folks for smearing Kerry’s record since it helped his big bro get re-elected. Even the party’s supposedly deep respect for military service only really applies under certain circumstances.

I would submit that Trump’s real crime, from the RNC’s perspective, is not what he said about immigrants or about John McCain. It’s that, in saying what he said about immigrants and about John McCain, he’s exposed the sides of the Republican Party that most prominent Republicans would rather you didn’t see.

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