To the Go-Along Republicans - WSJ op-ed
By Bret Stephens
(snip)
Of all of Donald Trump’s vile irruptions—about Sen. John McCain’s military record, or reporter Serge Kovaleski’s physical handicap, or Judge Gonzalo Curiel’s judicial fitness—his casual smear of Ghazala Khan is perhaps the vilest.
(snip)
What makes Mr. Trump’s remarks so foul is their undisguised sadism. He took a woman too heartbroken and anxious to speak of her dead son before an audience of millions and painted a target on her. He treated her silence as evidence that she was either a dolt or a stooge. He degraded her. “She was standing there. She had nothing to say,” Mr. Trump told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos. “She probably, maybe she wasn’t allowed to have anything to say. You tell me.”
In this comment there was the full unmasking of Mr. Trump, in case he needed further unmasking. He has, as Humayun’s father Khizr put it, a “black soul.” His problem isn’t a lack of normal propriety but the absence of basic human decency. He is morally unfit for any office, high or low.
This is the point that needs to dawn—and dawn soon—on Republican officeholders who pretend to endorse Mr. Trump while also pretending, via wink-and-nod, that they do not. Paul Ryan has tried to walk this razor’s edge by stressing how much he disagrees with Mr. Trump’s “ideas.” On Sunday the speaker issued a flabby statement extolling the Khan family’s sacrifice and denouncing religious tests for immigrants without mentioning Mr. Trump by name.
Mr. Ryan is doing his personal reputation and his party’s fortunes no favors with these evasions. The central issue in this election isn’t Mr. Trump’s ideas, such as they are. It’s his character, such as it is. The sin, in this case, is the sinner. It will not do for Republicans to say they denounce Mr. Trump’s personal slanders; his nativism and protectionism and isolationism; his mendacity and meanness and crassness; his disdain for constitutional protections—and still campaign for his election. There is no redemption in saying you went along with it, but only halfway; that with Mr. Trump you maintained technical virginity. To lie down with him is to wake up with him. It’s as simple as that.
That’s a thought that ought to frighten Republicans. The Khan slander was not Mr. Trump’s first and will not be his last or worst. As one wag on Twitter put it, the man always finds a new bottom. Nor are we likely done with new disclosures about Mr. Trump’s business practices and associations. Conservative die-hards may try to hold fast to the excuse that Hillary Clinton was, is, and always will be “worse,” but the argument can’t be sustained indefinitely. Mrs. Clinton is not the apotheosis of evil. She may be a corner-cutter and a liar, and she’ll almost surely appoint liberals to the Supreme Court. But at least she’s not a sociopath.
Politics is mostly the business of maintaining popularity in the here-and-now. Not always. Come January, Mrs. Clinton will likely be president. Whether there is a GOP that can still lay a claim to moral and political respectability is another question. Mr. Ryan and other Go-Along Republicans should treat the Khan episode as their last best hope to preserve political reputations they have worked so hard to build.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/to-the-go-along-republicans-1470091421
