Americans disapprove of the way Donald Trump handled his run-in with Khizr Khan, the Gold Star father whose son was killed in Iraq in 2004, by a ratio of 74-13. Republicans disapprove by a 61-22 margin, Independents by a 68-16 margin and Democrats by a margin of 90-3.
These numbers ought to scare the hell out of the go-along wing of the Republican Party, as this incident will most likely define the campaign from here on.
In political terms, it is the equivalent of having been for the bill before being against it, of Gerald Ford insisting (in 1976) that Poland was not in the control of the Soviet Union, Michael Dukakis’ ride in the tank, and Michael Dukakis’ answer, in response to a question as to what he would do were his wife raped and murdered, that he would not likely do very much.
In terms of America’s history with genuine crises, it was the equivalent of Joseph Welch’s question of “have you no decency” to Joseph McCarthy in 1955, and of America’s ferocious reaction to the Saturday Night Massacre in 1973, in which Richard Nixon tried to cut off the investigation into what would turn out to be his criminal actions, and the country responded, “No mas.”
In each case, these inflection points followed a long stage of a seeming quietus, in which abuses or outrages seemed to pass without notice or consequence, until one signal event crystalized everything.
In this case, the Khan affair was like a fishhook that dragged up with it a long series of things whose cumulative effect will be crushing: the mockery of the confinement and torture of John McCain (the veterans’ angle), the mocking of the disabled Times journalist (the sadism angle) and the outburst in May against Judge Curiel, sitting on a case brought against Trump by victimized clients (being against a member of an American ethnic minority, which Trump has been wont to attack).
In those prior cases, the impact was fatal, and it is likely to be so in this. Republicans survived McCarthy and Nixon when they came over time to realize their danger, and took serious steps towards curtailing their power. Have they yet seen the danger in Trump?
The brand of a party is supposed to mean something. It means not only that its candidate has won the most delegates under the primary system, but that the party itself can vouch for his fitness, as being a sane and a rational leader who may make the normal kind of mistakes in his tenure, but whose mind and whose judgment are sound.
But this party at large has been doing the opposite, hiding the flaws in an unstable figure who never sounds balanced for long.
“Your response is to hope against hope that someone will persuade Trump to feign rectitude,” Eugene Robinson said, blowing a hole through the great rotten heart of the go-along party. “You know full well how out of control and unbalanced he is. You just wish he’d do a better job of conning voters into thinking he can be trusted with nuclear codes.”
Company owners have done things like this, and they ended up with fines or in prison, after cigarettes had been proved to have really caused cancer, or faulty equipment in numerous vehicles had turned out to cost many lives. Trump in the White House could cost many more lives than cancer, or accidents. Americans disapprove of Trump now, and they may come to despise the Republican Party, if it tries to protect him too long.
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.”
