Someone needs to be fired

The Republican Presidential candidate merry-go-round continues to spin; the most recently announced candidate is Donald Trump.  And across America, comedians wept for joy.

Lily Tomlin once said that the problem with being a cynic is you just can’t keep up; the problem with making fun of Republican Presidential candidates is that they keep getting funnier.  Donald Trump is the perfect storm of a Republican candidate—he has never had a single rational thought go through his rug-covered head in his life, and he has no filter between his brain and his mouth.  Other GOP politicians are probably as stupid as Trump, maybe stupider (if that is possible; at some point you just hit bottom), but as professional politicians they don’t announce what’s piled up in their attic.  You can say one thing about candidate Donald Trump: anything he says is an idea he has sincerely believed in for at least 30 seconds.

I’ve read several reports that the existing GOP presidential field is unsure how to react to Trump; on the one hand, they want to widen the GOP’s gates to millions of Hispanic voters, but on the other hand they don’t want to offend Trump’s vast legion of supporters who agree with his sentiment that immigrants from Mexico are criminals and rapists.  What to do, what to do?

First of all, it is typical of politicians to think there is some middle ground that can satisfy voters with Hispanic backgrounds and virulent racists who want to build a 20 foot high wall on the Mexican border.  On other issues the GOP don’t have trouble picking a side; no Republican stays up nights wondering how to increase his (or her, but mostly his) appeal to gun control advocates, or people who think abortion should be legal just because the Supreme Court says it is.  It’s a simple choice—either woo Latino voters, or say that Trump has some darned good ideas that you’ll look into once you’re elected and kiss the Hispanic vote goodbye.

If it is simply a matter of electoral math, the calculus should be simple: the number of Hispanic voters far exceeds the number of people who support Trump’s demagoguery.  Besides, most Trump supporters don’t vote because they don’t know their own birthdate and therefore aren’t registered.

But secondly, this isn’t some nuanced point of national policy; this is a megalomaniac spouting the most vitriolic, racist nonsense a “candidate” for national office has spouted since George Wallace in 1968.  Any Republican candidate who has any remnant of a soul should have one response—call Trump a lunatic whose values are NOT shared by the Republican Party and move on.  Anyone hesitating in denouncing Trump because there might be some political gain from appearing to support him should be disqualified from holding elective office. 

To badly misquote Mark Twain, always tell the truth because you’ll satisfy your friends and amaze everyone else.  If the Republican Party wants to have any credibility that it wants to lead all Americans and not just a cabal of super-wealthy White Men, then they need to turn their collective backs on Donald Trump now.  The fact that this hasn’t happened proves either that they agree with him, or they are afraid of him.  In either case, they can’t be trusted with any position of responsibility in the American government.