I’m sure it is inadvertent, but the most recent Donald Trump embarrassment offers the GOP a way to restore itself to something resembling respectability — if the right people step forward and have the nerve to do it.
In the immediate term, though, the tape is threatening to crack Trump’s support within the GOP, whose leaders must weigh whether its worth it to defend Trump and risk poisoning the party brand or distance themselves and risk demoralizing their base.
Based on the early reaction, they’re choosing the latter approach.
“No woman should ever be described in these terms or talked about in this manner,” RNC chairman Reince Priebus said in a statement. “Ever.”
I’d say the brand is more poisoned than they seem to think, but a no-nonsense public repudiation of Trump right now, together with a no-nonsense repudiation of the fringe nutjobs to whom he appeals — the white supremacists, the gun nuts, the evangelical loonies — would do a lot of good. If they explicitly link James Dobson, Robert Jeffress, Jerry Falwell, Jr., Tony Perkins, Wayne LaPerriere, David Duke, and on and on, to the colossal embarrassment of Trump, they could effect a needful house-cleaning and reclaim the appalled center-right constituency that they’ve lost.
So much of the party has whored itself to Trump and the fringe special interest groups that their credibility is gone forever: Cruz, Christie, Rubio, Ryan, Priebus. But people like John Kasich, Jeb Bush, and Lindsay Graham could plausibly do that; they aren’t whores, and they aren’t crazy. I’m not wild about all of their policy choices, but they’re more or less honorable men — according to the expedient mores of politics — and they would find a lot of conservatives willing to give them an audience.
But: It must happen now … before the Party is crushed in the general election. If they wait till afterward, and then appoint a committee, and blandly agree they’d better do something … the party will die of starvation. But leadership willing right now, this day, to say and do the obviously needful things will find that Trump’s egregious awfulness is the very thing to save the party.