Donald Trump’s latest infamy — a call to ban any Muslims from entering this country, including U.S. citizens who are abroad — has elicited predictable and wholly appropriate eruptions of outrage and condemnation. My corporate cousins (their publication is owned by Mort Zuckerman, who also owns my publication) at the New York Daily News editorial page put it perfectly: Trump’s craven stand against the First Amendment “was a searing humiliation for a country uniquely founded on the highest principles of fairness, human dignity and the free exercise of religion” and he is the “shame of a nation.”
[SEE: Editorial Cartoons on Donald Trump]
And while his tongue was at least somewhat planted in his cheek, Paul Waldman over at The Washington Post’s Plum Line blog raised a legitimate question: “Isn’t is about time people in the white community stood up against this kind of extremism?”
SiriusXM’s Michael Smerconish put it a slightly different way on Twitter, but same idea:
He’s practically begging Republicans to reject his bid – when will they give him his wish?
— Michael Smerconish (@smerconish)
Yeah, Republican Party, I’m looking at you. Oh sure, the latest toxic idiocy from the ayatollah of Trump Tower drew general condemnation from his competitors for the 2016 Republican nomination. (Though some were more, ahem, politic than others — including the fading Ben Carson, who wants all foreign visitors to be “monitored during their stay as is done in many countries”; it’s funny, I grew up during the Cold War and thought that we’d prevailed over those countries.) And there have been skirmishes and various levels of denunciation from Trump’s rivals over the course of his candidacy — with the vociferousness often in inverse proportion to the denunciator’s standing in the polls — but for the most part Trump has managed to skate by with Republicans increasingly worried about him but unwilling to consistently take him on.
They continue to behave as if his fall is inevitable so they can, for the most part, run their respective races as if Trump wasn’t there or wasn’t a threat. So, for example, with conventional wisdom seeing freshman GOP Sens. Marco Rubio of Florida and Ted Cruz of Texas as the last men standing (remember, you read it here first), Rubio has started attacking Cruz, while Trump remains soaring above the rest of them.
[SEE: Republican Party Cartoons]
More, broadly, no one has mounted a sustained assault on Trump, at least in part because conventional wisdom has foreordained that such an assault would be fruitless. As the Post’s Chris Cillizza wrote last night:
What’s remarkable, however, is how little sustained incoming attack Trump has had to deal with — either from his rivals or the party write large. Yes, John Kasich’s super PAC has gone after Trump as dangerously inexperienced in ads. And, yes, every candidate — or at least most of them — condemned Trump’s proposed Muslim immigrant ban tonight.
But, overall, Trump has been treated with kid gloves by a field that either wants to be the receptacle for his voters if/when the real estate mogul drops out (Cruz) or is simply afraid of the repercussions of attempting to take Trump down (everyone else). It’s like they aren’t even trying to stop what they all acknowledge is a massive and growing problem.
It’s like they expect him to disappear without any of them having to do the dirty work. And maybe it will be so. I’ve said repeatedly that Trump will not be the GOP nominee and still believe that to be the case. And there are plenty of data points suggesting Trump vulnerabilities, some of which we’ve covered previously. George Washington University’s excellent Lara Brown, for example, showed in this publication last week that at least one poll showing a massive Trump lead is faulty. And the Washington Examiner’s Tim Carney, in a thorough, must-read on the state of play in Iowa, made a point about why Trump will lose there that could have broader resonance. “Telling a pollster you support Trump is often more of an expression of defiance than an indication of voter intent,” he wrote — and you could say the same of national ones. “And as pollsters’ likely-voter screens are honed over the coming weeks, expect Trump to fall further in Iowa polls.”
Indeed, the Post’s Philip Bump dug into the Monmouth poll, which has Trump falling behind Cruz in Iowa and finds that a big chunk of Trump support comes from people who don’t ordinarily vote. Carney says that Cruz is going to cruise in the Hawkeye State and puts Trump at third most likely to win; an Iowa drubbing would go a long way toward puncturing the myth of Trump invulnerability.
[SEE: Editorial Cartoons on the 2016 Presidential Elections]
But that’s still nearly two months away; in the meantime, Trump keeps blazing new paths of embarrassment for his party and our country. Surely someone on the right will launch an assault on Trump that amounts to more than an angry press release and a couple of tweets? You’d think that candidate would be setting themselves up to be the hero of the establishment or at the very least of sane Republicans.
At what point will someone or someones in the GOP grow a spine, take off the kid gloves and play hardball with Trump?
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After Muslim Ban Comments, Will the GOP Stand Up to Donald Trump? originally appeared on usnews.com