The silence was deafening. Hillary Clinton had just launched a blistering assault on Donald Trump’s fitness for the presidency, and few prominent Republicans came to their presumptive nominee’s aid.
In her speech last week, ostensibly devoted to foreign affairs, Clinton landed a few glancing blows on what she described as Trump’s “dangerously incoherent” foreign policy. Republicans responded with criticisms of her record as secretary of state, ranging from Benghazi to her housing sensitive emails on a homebrew server in an age of cybersecurity threats.
But when it came to Clinton’s real target, Trump’s temperament, his Republican defenders were scarce, because even many of the elected officials who have endorsed him are troubled by the characteristics the likely Democratic nominee described. (A lot of these Republicans don’t care for the substance of his foreign policy either.)
“The strength of the ‘he’s … dangerous’ attack on Trump is that it’s obviously true, it’s important, and there’s no good response to it,” wrote Business Insider’s Josh Barro. “If Obama said Romney might nuke Europe, Rs would have all been, ‘That’s ridiculous fearmongering!’ With Trump, they just look at their shoes.”
If this line of criticism works — a Reuters/Ipsos poll released at the end of the week showed Clinton opening up a nearly 10-point leade over Trump, not long after the billionaire had briefly eclipsed her in the RealClearPolitics polling average — it would be a significant upgrade over her campaign’s oft-mocked “Dangerous Donald” jibes.
In the 72 hours following Clinton’s portrayal of Trump as a thin-skinned crybaby who can’t be trusted with the nuclear codes, the de facto GOP standard-bearer has been making the case that Judge Gonzalo Curiel is too biased against him to continue presiding over the Trump University class-action suit (a legal dispute that itself raises concerns about Trump’s fitness for office) largely on the basis of Curiel’s Mexican heritage.
Trump has at various points described the American-born judge as “a Mexican.” He doubled down during an interview last week with the Wall Street Journal. But it was an exchange with CNN’s Jake Tapper that really raised eyebrows.
Tapper kept pressing him on whether it was by definition racist to say Curiel could not perform his job because of his Mexican ancestry. Trump denied the racism charge. But he kept repeating that he is building a wall to keep illegal immigrants from Mexico, among other places, out of the United States, and he said that while Curiel’s appreciation of his heritage was otherwise a good thing, it created a conflict of interest.
Just hours removed from finally ending his standoff with Trump and endorsing him for president, House Speaker Paul Ryan was forced to once again rebuke him. In an interview with the Washington Examiner, Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Preibus distanced himself from Trump’s comments and said the soon-to-be Republican nominee was going to have to “evolve in regard to how we’re communicating to Hispanics across the country.”
“I wouldn’t invoke race into any sort of attack or commentary,” Preibus said.
Trump may be clumsily attempting to critique Curiel’s specific record as someone who may not be sympathetic to the Republican’s immigration proposals and his membership in a Latino legal association that has “La Raza” in its name (Trump described him as a “member of a society… [that’s] very pro-Mexico”), though the group is not the National Council of La Raza itself. But as a candidate who has been accused of both animus against Latinos and a willingness to at least turn a blind eye to racist support, the way Trump has made the argument crosses the line into suggesting Americans of Mexican descent cannot be counted on to deal fairly with his Trump University case.
The inability to convincingly defend Trump in these controversies has made even many Republicans’ endorsements ring hollow. Like Ryan and Priebus, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is supporting Trump. But McConnell devoted much of his media blitz for his new book The Long Game to criticizing Trump and trying to keep the Republican brand distinct from the billionaire’s, including in an interview with the Examiner.
“I would say to some of my conservative friends I share some of the reservations you do about Trump’s, some of Trump’s positions, and certainly his temperament, but look at the alternative,” McConnell said.
This could be read as echoing Clinton’s argument against Trump even if ultimately concluding the Democratic front-runner would somehow be worse.
Elsewhere, McConnell worried that just as 1964 nominee Barry Goldwater alienated blacks from the Republican Party with his vote against that year’s Civil Rights Act, Trump could alienate Hispanics.
After blacks shifted from the GOP to the Democratic Party during the New Deal era, they continued to vote Republican in percentages similar to the Latino Republican vote share today. The black vote plummeted from 32 percent for Richard Nixon in 1960 to just 6 percent for Goldwater four years later, never exceeding 15 percent in a presidential election ever again.
Goldwater advanced conservatism within the Republican Party, however, and his nomination came in the context of a realignment that was broadly favorable to the GOP. Republicans did well in the midterms just two years later and won five of the next six presidential elections. As of 2016, Republicans have lost the popular vote in five of the last six presidential elections, and the demographics that are unfavorably disposed toward Trump are growing rapidly.
McConnell didn’t vote for Goldwater in 1964 over the civil rights question. While he has suggested that the damage done by Lyndon Johnson’ liberalism made that a questionable decision in retrospect, reasonable people can ask: Well, then why are you with Trump now?
All this comes as Trump is facing pressure to come up with a second act for the general election to follow up what worked for him in the primaries. The risk is that his usual shtick in his mass rallies, while effective at bonding with supporters, will only reinforce Clinton’s complaints that he rants and raves angrily. Former Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole, the unsuccessful 1996 nominee against Clinton’s husband and a Trump endorser, told the New York Times that the businessman’s anti-Clinton criticisms were “scattered.”
Yet Trump wasn’t the only one whose temperament was questionable. As a riot broke out after his rally in San Jose, Calif., with acts of violence against Trump supporters caught on videotape, the city’s Democratic mayor largely blamed the candidate himself. Clinton also suggested that Trump bore a lot of the blame for political violence erupting in the United States, even though her campaign events aren’t generally being disrupted by Trump supporters. An editor at a highbrow liberal website urged readers to “start a riot” if Trump came to their town (the editor was suspended).
Only Trump seemed unbowed by the demonstrators he called “thugs.” And while Trump’s bravado about the rioters being “lucky” that his supporters “remained peaceful” could reinforce Clinton’s point that he is fanning the flames, these comments may well be more attractive to American voters than people waving Mexican flags while burning American ones and pelting women with eggs. That is certainly how voters desirous of law and order have responded to such events in the past.
The 2016 election could come down to one question: Who is more unhinged — Trump or the flag-burning mobs who descend upon his rallies?
