Is there any hope, any way forward?

Last updated on: October 8, 2016 at 9:54 am by Dan Peterson

Is there any hope, any way forward? 2016-10-08T09:54:30-06:00 Dan Peterson

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The Trump presidential campaign is unlikely to end well, either for itself or for its Republican fellow travelers. Is it still possible to take a turn off? (Wikimedia Commons)

I’m sorry, actually, to be posting so much on the presidential campaign right at the moment, and especially on such an unprecedentedly sordid aspect of it. But we’ve plainly reached an inflection point in the race for the White House.

My expectation is that nothing will significantly change, that Donald Trump will remain the Republican presidential nominee, that he will go down to massive defeat, and that he will, very likely, take the party’s majority in the Senate (and even, possibly, in the House of Representatives) down with him.

There is just the slight possibility, however, that the Party could redeem itself, reclaim its integrity, by tossing Trump overboard. Ms. Clinton’s victory is virtually certain in any case, and the Supreme Court is lost for a generation, but at least the Republican Party might go forward with a clear conscience and with the moral stature to credibly confront Clinton Inc. as that gang again takes control of the executive branch of the federal government.

Heck, there’s even the very slight chance, given the stunning weaknesses and liabilities of Mrs. Clinton as a candidate, that a grown-up candidate of recognized integrity and competence might beat her. The odds of that are extremely low, but not quite zero.

Trump’s scandals — he’s nothing if not loud, in this regard as in others — have overshadowed the fact that some very damaging things have also been coming out about Mrs. Clinton, as well. In my more cynical and paranoid moments, I sometimes even wonder whether his candidacy might not be one of the most clever political ploys in American history: Only the Republican nomination of the most unpopular major-party candidate on record could really guarantee the election of the second most unpopular major-party candidate on record. (Mr. Clinton, one of our wiliest politicians, seems to have at least tacitly encouraged Donald Trump to run.)

A good candidate with the credibility to take the campaign to Mrs. Clinton might do surprisingly well at this late stage, even if he or she didn’t win.

Mitt Romney is virtually the only possible Republican replacement candidate who has the name recognition and the network to mount a campaign with only a month to go; I doubt that he would assume the role, but, once again, the chances aren’t quite zero.

Rich Lowry’s take on the situation is interesting:

“The Trump Video”

But the real stunners are to be found in the Trumpist comments that follow Lowry’s brief article. Take a look at them and tremble for your country. Notice the way these folks angrily defend their Leader, even against plain evidence that he’s an utter contemptible lowlife. Notice one of them, in particular, by the name of Tito Perdue. Responding to the recently surfaced Trump video, he actually seems to call for the disfranchisement of women.

Think he’s joking? Here a little item — the first my search found — about Trump supporter Tito Perdue:

“Tito Perdue on the Institution of Racism”

Now, obviously, Mr. Perdue doesn’t speak for all Trumpists. I’ve said before that I can easily understand those who’ve decided (up to this point) to hold their noses and vote for Trump because they strongly oppose Hillary. I strongly oppose Hillary, too. I have a bit harder time understanding those who, among all of the possible Republican nominees, supported the execrable Donald Trump from the very first. But there is an element among Trump’s supporters that is openly racist, xenophobic, bigoted, hateful, quasi-fascist, and, sometimes, seemingly inclined to violence. Such people have never before, in my experience, been so prominent among the supporters of a major-party presidential nominee. And we’ve never before had a major-party presidential nominee who seemed so comfortably unconcerned with, even occasionally so very welcoming to, such people among his supporters. They are genuinely frightening, and their ascendancy with the Trump campaign is deeply troubling, to me at least.

Bill Kristol raises the Mitt Romney possibility here:

“Dump Trump, Now More Than Ever”

And here’s a piece written back in that serene era, three days ago, when the most recent and most prominent Trump scandal was either his weird ongoing war with a former beauty contestant or his possible two decades of tax-free luxury living:

“Donald Trump’s October Surprise”

It raises the still-important thought that Trump’s vaunted brilliance as a businessman — one of the few even slightly credible reasons for supporting him — is complete fiction.

By the way, the weak mainstream Trumpist defense that I’ve been hearing on the matter of the newly released tape is that the timing of this new scandal is suspicious, and that the Hillary Clinton campaign might be behind it. This, though, is an irrelevant deflection. Of course, the Clinton campaign is seeking to defeat Donald Trump. That is no more surprising than the fact that your team’s opponent on the football field is hoping to score touchdowns against you and that it will use stratagems and surprises in order to reach the end zone. The only real question is whether Trump’s words are genuine. And nobody, not even the Trump campaign, is suggesting that they’re not.

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