The New York Times is aghast at Donald Trump’s challenge to the bifactional ruling party:
This is a moment of reckoning for the Republican Party. It’s incumbent on its leadership to account for the failures and betrayals that led to this, and find a better way to address them than the demagogy on offer.
Republicans haven’t yet begun to grapple with this. Instead they’re falling into line.
Republican leaders have for years failed to think about much of anything beyond winning the next election. Year after year, the party’s candidates promised help for middle-class people who lost their homes, jobs and savings to recession, who lost limbs and well-being to war, and then did next to nothing. That Mr. Trump was able to enthrall voters by promising simply to “Make America Great Again” — but offering only xenophobic, isolationist or fantastical ideas — is testimony to how thoroughly they reject the politicians who betrayed them.
Now, myopic as ever, Republican leaders are talking themselves into supporting Mr. Trump. At a party retreat in Florida last month, Mr. Trump’s adviser Paul Manafort, brought in to make the candidate seem safer to the old guard, assured them that Mr. Trump will better prepare himself for the presidency. “That was all most of these guys needed to hear,” said an operative in the room. “Maybe he’s trainable.” But within a day, Mr. Trump was back to making vile comments at his rallies. In his confused foreign policy address, he demonstrated nothing but a willful refusal to learn.
Xenophobia and isolationism are to be vastly preferred to the treasonous fantasies of the Republican and Democratic politicians alike. There is nothing confusing about Trump’s foreign policy: what is hard to understand about America First for anyone who doesn’t have other objectives in mind?
If the Republican Party doesn’t fall in line behind Donald Trump, it might as well cease to exist and its members can go where they belong, to the ironically-named, anti-democratic Democratic Party.
And to all those conservatives and Republicans crying about how Trump is certain to lose to Clinton, ask yourself this: why doesn’t the great left-liberal standard sound a whole lot happier about Trump being the Republican nominee? Do they sound like people who are confident of victory?
Let’s hope Donald Trump continues to refuse to learn from the USA’s failed, anti-American political class.