The current fractured, furious, divided (and losing) state of the Republican Party is some of the best news this year. The worst news was when the party seemed to be coming together, seemed to be “consolidating” around its front-runner, seemed to be making its nominee act as if he were normal, and he seemed to be (in the weeks around his convention) someone with a viable chance to become the next president.
Had that been sustained, it would have meant the American dream was finally over, the torch had been dropped by the Donald Trump generation and the shining city on a hill had become a slum in a very low-rent location, for which the only direction was down.
The fear was less that Trump would become somehow “normal” than that “normal” itself would come to seem Trump-like, with the aid of some very corrupt and much too-pliant clerics who said that Trump was really no worse than King David (who as they said was also a sinner), and of an establishment that hoped it could win one for the Gipper if it dragged him over the finish line on the eighth of November, before the public realized (on the ninth, for example) that its incoming president was a crazed ignoramus with a penchant for cruelty and a fan base of racists.
It was a dream, but at last it is over, and the world is much better for that.
The moment non-Trumpers knew would someday arrive came on the morning of July 29, when Trump, still holding a small lead from his own convention, said he had been viciously slandered by the parents of U.S. Army Captain Humayun Khan, killed in Iraq 12 years earlier, who had gone to the Democratic convention to make their case to the country that American Muslims were patriots, too.
By Aug. 14, he was losing by daylight to Hillary Clinton, and the gap in those polls was nothing compared to the gap in another survey taken on the subject of values, which showed that large numbers of his fellow Americans thought him very abnormal indeed.
Eighty-three percent were very (62 percent) or somewhat (21 percent) bothered by Trump’s mockery of a disabled reporter, while 17 percent were not. Seventy-five were disturbed by his fight with the Khan parents, and 71 percent by the suit brought against Trump and Trump University, in which a large number of former dissatisfied students were accusing the mogul of fraud.
Sense was not dead, just dozing a little, letting the outrages pile up slowly until the dam broke.
Other things they attempted to pass off as normal were schoolyard taunts tossed off at holders of office, incitements to violence uttered at rallies, references to genitals (his own) in debate format, (surely a first by anyone’s standards), insults to women about their appearance, insults to men about their height and demeanor, suggestions that a foe’s fathers had tried to kill John F. Kennedy, abuse and manhandling of female reporters and hints of thugs’ “visits” to delegates at the convention, in case any dissent should arise.
All this and more was indulged for the sake of a “unity” that never existed (Trump never won a majority of GOP voters) and dissolved even further in the face of more recent events. A low point was reached in Cleveland on July 23, when Ted Cruz was booed off the stage when he said “vote your conscience,” while his wife was escorted by officers through furious mobs.
This was the “normal” to which they would take us. It can’t disappear soon enough.
Noemie Emery, a Washington Examiner columnist, is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and author of “Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families.”
