Pity the poor elected Republicans desperate to survive in a world in which Donald Trump is center stage. His pithy, unapologetic insanity and never-ending stream of inanities have quite clearly captivated the conservative base, leaving what passes for “credible candidates” gasping for air.
Among presidential candidates, Trump has now broken into the low 30s in the Huffington Post polling composite, with Ben Carson in second place, trailing far behind at 12 percent. Think about it: the two least qualified members of the GOP field are the only two who’ve managed to make it into the double digits. So while the rest of the field continues to pray for Trump’s increasingly less inevitable implosion, the “credible” bunch have decided they need to blow their hair out and get Trumpy.
{mosads}But being Trump isn’t as easy as that. No workaday Republican suit can be that classy, that luxurious, or that unashamedly willing to appeal to the conservative id.
Look at New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who has been busy trying to out-Trump Trump by claiming he would track immigrants the way FedEx tracks packages. “I’m going to have Fred Smith, the founder of FedEx, come work for the government for three months,” he said. “Just come for three months to Immigration and Customs Enforcement and show these people.”
FedEx tracks its packages with bar codes. How exactly does he think the FedEx approach would work on humans? By branding them? The last time someone tried that, it didn’t work out so well. While the notion certainly has some of that Trump je ne sais quoi, it’s doomed to fail. Few conservatives will abandon Trump for Christie because Trump isn’t enough like Hitler.
Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, meanwhile, seems mystified that four solid years of union busting haven’t stopped his poll numbers from cratering into the single digits. After watching Trump get serious traction with his racist rants against Mexico and immigrants, including hilarious nonsense about having Mexico pay for a classy border wall, Walker decided to one-up his foe by demanding a wall with — wait for it — Canada.
“[Some people in New Hampshire] raised some very legitimate concerns, including some law enforcement folks that brought that up to me at one of our town hall meetings about a week and a half ago,” he said. “So that is a legitimate issue for us to look at.”
No. No, it’s not.
First of all, it’s utterly impractical. The U.S.-Canadian border is the longest in the world, at 5,525 miles long, and if it cost anything like the southern border wall, it would set us back more than $21.5 billion. And for what, to keep hordes of Québécois fur trappers from invading the streets of Berlin, N.H.?
Even more importantly, Canadians are mostly white — so conservatives don’t care if they sneak in. Trump knows that Canadians don’t tickle the racist-xenophobic node of the conservative lizard brain.
Jeb Bush, the “smart Bush,” the “Bush who gets Latinos,” tried to ape Trump’s xenophobia by railing against “anchor babies,” the native-born Americans with undocumented immigrant parents. Then, realizing he was alienating the Latinos his party needs to have any chance of presidential relevance, he decided to alienate Asians instead. “[F]rankly it’s more related to Asian people,” he bizarrely said.
These are all valiant efforts at peak stupid that all fall woefully short. Because while no one has ever accused Republicans of grace, tolerance and humility, none can come close to matching the boorish ignorance of Donald Trump, the master himself.
Moulitsas is the founder and publisher of political blog Daily Kos.