The Trump campaign has got so bizarre that I’ve begun wondering if maybe it began as a publicity stunt that went bad — he won! I mean, the campaign is now seriously suggesting that the Khan family are agents of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Roger Stone, an informal adviser to Donald Trump, took to Twitter on Sunday to claim that Khizr Khan, the father of a slain war hero who spoke at last week’s Democratic National Convention, is working for the Muslim Brotherhood.
Mr. Khan more than an aggrieved father of a Muslim son- he's Muslim Brotherhood agent helping Hillary https://t.co/mJuUYw60nK
— Roger Stone (@RogerJStoneJr) August 1, 2016
The link that accompanied Stone’s tweet outlines a conspiracy theory that claims Khan is working to bring radical Muslims to the United States. The article Stone linked to also alleges that Khan’s son, Capt. Humayun Khan, was a Muslim martyr who was killed “before his Islamist mission was accomplished.”
I say again: Nobody has any excuse any longer for failing to see how sick and crazy the (formerly-)fringe Right actually is.
I cannot for an instant believe that, in my lifetime, Muslims, Hispanics, gays, women — anybody that Trump has mocked or designated as other — will trust the Republican Party again; realistically, then, the Republican Party is dead. I understand that a lot of people don’t think that Jeb Bush, John Kasich, John McCain et. al. represent much of an improvement over Trump — but they’re not demonstrably insane and overtly hostile to the nation’s founding ideals. Those men, representing the forward-looking pragmatism that was once the centerpiece of Republican thought, need to publicly leave and found a new party.