With Donald Trump hurtling toward victory in the GOP primaries, let’s take stock of who Republican voters are nominating as their standard-bearer.
They’re nominating someone who wants to overturn the First Amendment. “I’m going to open up our libel laws, so when they write purposefully negative and horrible and false articles, we can sue them and win lots of money,” the real estate tycoon said Friday to a cheering crowd. “So that when The New York Times writes a hit piece, which is a total disgrace, or when The Washington Post, which is there for no other reason, writes a hit piece, we can sue them and win lots of money.” Write a negative story about a politician in Trump’s America? Get sued!
{mosads}They’re nominating someone who admires bloodthirsty tyrants. “You’ve got to give him credit,” swooned Trump over North Korean despot Kim Jong Un in January. “How many young guys — he was like 26 or 25 when his father died — take over these tough generals, and all of a sudden … he goes in, he takes over, he’s the boss, it’s incredible. He wiped out the uncle, he wiped out this one, that one.”
And Trump adores Russian strongman Vladimir Putin, even defending him against charges that he’s had journalists murdered. “If he has killed reporters, I think that’s terrible. But this isn’t like somebody that’s stood with a gun and he’s, you know, taken the blame or he’s admitted that he’s killed. He’s always denied it.”
They’re nominating someone who is an unapologetic misogynist. “Look at that face! Would anyone vote for that?” Trump said in September about Republican presidential challenger Carly Fiorina. “Can you imagine that, the face of our next president?” There’s his long-running feud with Fox host and debate moderator Megyn Kelly — he’s called her a bimbo and said, “You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes. Blood coming out of her wherever.” He told Esquire once, “You know, it doesn’t really matter what [the media] write as long as you’ve got a young and beautiful piece of ass.”
It goes on. He told a woman, “You’re disgusting, you’re disgusting,” for breastfeeding her baby in front of him. He approvingly retweeted a supporter who wrote, “If Hillary Clinton can’t satisfy her husband what makes her think she can satisfy America?” And speaking of Clinton, he was really upset when he found out women also use bathrooms, “I know where she went, it’s disgusting, I don’t want to talk about it.”
Republicans are nominating someone who, despite his claims that “the blacks” and Latinos love him, will deliver Democrats record support among people of color. Trump’s famous retweet of @whitegenocideTM was no aberration; social media network analysis company Little Bird found that 62 percent of the people Trump retweeted in the last week of January had ties to white supremacy. As if that wasn’t clear enough, he made people’s heads spin last weekend by actively refusing to disavow the support of the KKK.
And, of course, they’re nominating someone who has agitated the Latino vote like no one since California’s Pete Wilson doomed his state’s GOP to fringe status by backing the racist Proposition 187. “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending the best,” Trump infamously said. “They’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.”
In other words, Republicans are nominating someone who’s perfect for their party but abhorrent to the majority of Americans who don’t vote in GOP primaries. And that’s why party elders are freaking out.
Moulitsas is the founder and publisher of Daily Kos.