MAY 5, 2016
Photo: Getty
You would think that Donald Trump would be on top of the world today, after his final two rivals (from an original field of 17 candidates) suspended their campaigns, making Trump the party’s presumptive Presidential nominee.
But all is not jubilation in Republican-land.
Sure, Republican National Committee chair Reince Priebus sent out his obligatory congratulations via Twitter:
“@RealDonaldTrump will be presumptive @GOP nominee, we all need to unite and focus on defeating @HillaryClinton #NeverClinton.”
But other GOP luminaries were not so quick to throw confetti.
Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, the most powerful elected Republican in the country, said on Thursday afternoon that he is not ready to endorse or support Donald Trump:
“At this point, I’m just not there right now, and it’s because I think of part of the last campaign. What a lot of Republicans want to see is that we have a standard bearer that bears our standards. At this point, I think that he needs to do more to unify this party.”
Trump, of course, responded by saying that he was not ready support Ryan’s agenda. Nyah-nyah.
The last two elected Republican Presidents, George W. Bush and George H.W. Bush, have announced that they’ve decided to skip going to the Trump convention, as has the party’s most recent standard-bearer, Mitt Romney.
John McCain, the party’s 2008 nominee who lost to Barack Obama and is in the political fight of his life to retain his Senate seat in Arizona, has publicly pledged his support to the Republican nominee but was caught on tape saying,
“If Donald Trump is at the top of the ticket, here in Arizona, with over 30 percent of the vote being the Hispanic vote, no doubt that this may be the race of my life. If you listen or watch Hispanic media in the state and in the country, you will see that it is all anti-Trump. The Hispanic community is roused and angry in a way that I’ve never seen in 30 years.”
McCain’s kissin’ cousin and Presidential aspirant Sen. Lindsay Graham said it simply,
“If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed…….and we will deserve it.”
And rising Republican star Sen. Ben Sasse of red-state Nebraska went even further ,
“With Clinton and Trump, the fix is in. Heads, they win; tails, you lose. Why are we confined to these two terrible options? This is America. If both choices stink, we reject them and go bigger.”
These are Republican leaders, remember, with national reputations and elections to face, and they still publicly react to their party’s presumptive nominee this way.
How did this happen? On Thursday, Chuck Todd on MSNBC reminded us that, at the start of the Republican primary process, we were assured that this was the deepest GOP bunch ever, at least compared to the Michelle Bachmanns and Herman Cains of 2012. Among the 17 GOP candidates in 2016 were 4 sitting governors, 5 former governors, 4 sitting U.S. Senators and 2 previous Iowa caucus winners, all with a combined 140 years of elected experience. And the Republicans still wound up with a TV reality show star as their Presidential nominee.
It’s their own fault. In 2010, an off-year election in which the GOP scored major victories in governorships across the country, Congressional districts were redrawn to ensure that the electorate in most major districts remained white and Republican, which is why the GOP has won the House of Representatives every year since then. The next year. Trump emerged to ignite his nonsensical birther routine, implying that President Obama is not legitimate because he was born in Kenya. With his largely white Republican Congressmen behind him, then Speaker of the House John Boehner did nothing to shut it down, excusing himself by saying that it was not his job to tell his members how to think. And thus Trump-ism was born.
Undoubtedly, many Republicans will come home to Trump when they consider that the alternative is a Hillary Clinton presidency. But it is striking that, on a day when politicians usually rush to the microphones to support their presumptive nominee, today many Republican leaders are running away.
