Between the Lines / By Peter McDermott
Most of us know from watching the detectives in the movies and on TV that the blackmailer doesn’t quit. He or she should be sensible, you’d think, and cut and run after the initial payoff. But the type will always go back for more and, invariably, it ends badly.
It never seems to end well with the demagogue, either.
Republican leaders, though, have been waiting for Donald Trump’s “pivot” towards general-election mode.
They’re deluding themselves, believes Rich Lowry, whose conservative National Review devoted its entire Feb. 15 issue to excoriating Trump. In a June 8 piece in Politico entitled “The Agony of the Trump Endorsers,” he wrote: “If Trump didn’t call [Judge] Curiel a Mexican unworthy of hearing his case, you’d almost wonder what had knocked the candidate off his game.”
Lowry concluded with: “Donald Trump may have many talents. Not being Donald Trump isn’t one of them.”
Prominent Republican consultant Mike Murphy, it seems, has an even lower opinion of his party’s presumptive nominee, as he revealed in an interview with John Harwood broadcast on June 9.
“I mean, the problem is Trump doesn't know what he doesn't know, and he doesn't know very much. And so that would leave him with a very small arsenal of blunt instruments as president.
“If we become a dysfunction banana republic, are we still the reserve currency? You know, because right now, the dollar's the safest thing in the world because we're seen as stable. If we're a banana republic, that goes away,” added Murphy, who worked with Jeb Bush’s Super PAC during the primaries. “And it would be a catastrophic loss for our country and our geo-political position. And a clown president would do that.”
On June 10, David Brooks wrote in the New York Times that it’s a classic conservative belief “that character is destiny. Temperament is foundational. Each candidate has to cross some basic threshold of dependability as a human being before it’s even relevant to judge his or her policy agenda.” But for Brooks, “Trump’s personality is pathological.”
Peter Wehner, who served in the last three Republican administrations, wrote in the Times on the same day: “The stain of Trump will last long after his campaign. His insults, cruelty and bigotry will sear themselves into the memory of Americans for a long time to come, especially those who are the targets of his invective.”
Meanwhile, the real-estate mogul’s campaign is still with us. His almost deranged responses to the act of mass murder this past weekend in Orlando had GOP politicians “fretting anew,” Politico reported Tuesday.
“Several lawmakers opted to remain silent,” it said, “apparently hoping this latest controversy would wash away with the next news cycle.”
But what will the next news cycle bring?
