Stephen Hayes analyzed the problem correctly back in a piece in late July headlined, “Donald Trump Is Crazy, and So Is the GOP for Embracing Him.” And he also prescribed the solution (short of persuading or forcing Trump to relinquish the nomination, which should also be explored):
So, what should Republican leaders do? Trump is, after all, their nominee for president and the leader of their party. Isn’t it better to simply make the best of a bad situation? I suppose that’s one possibility and I’d assume it’s what virtually all Republicans will do. There’s little doubt that this bit of Trumpian insanity will fade away like the ones that came before. So this party of followers, nearly all of them, will keep their heads down and wait for this latest incident to be eclipsed by other news—the Munich attacks, Hillary Clinton’s running mate, the Democratic National Convention. The better course would be to speak out against Trump, to say in public what some of you said when you initially opposed his candidacy, to say what many of you have said to me privately: Donald Trump isn’t fit to serve as president, and electing him president would be dangerous. That might mean saying that you’re unwilling to support the nominee of your party. It might mean retracting an endorsement. Trump supporters would pretend that your refusal to support Trump means you’re backing Hillary Clinton. It’s an absurd argument, of course. There are other options. This election is not a “binary choice” as Trump backers claim. If the top candidates are, on the one hand, a congenital liar who jeopardized national security in service of her own ambition, and on the other, an unstable conspiracy theorist, the best choice is none of the above—a non-endorsement, a third party candidate, a write-in. Doing this would be risky and perhaps costly. It’d also be right.
Read the whole thing.
And while it would have been better to have followed the path Hayes recommended ten weeks ago, it’s not too late. There’s a month left in the campaign. The prospects for a Republican party that justifies and rationalizes Trump for the next 30 days, until his defeat, are very different from the prospects of a Republican party that has, to the extent possible, distanced itself and distinguished itself from Trump. But the time to act has to be now.
