USA TODAY International Edition
GOP stalwarts push back against Trump juggernaut
The nation was just absorbing the news of the horrific mass murder at a gay nightclub in Orlando, and Donald Trump was already exploiting the tragedy.
“Appreciate the congrats for being right on radical Islamic terrorism. I don’t want congrats, I want toughness and vigilance,” Trump tweeted Sunday on his beloved Twitter.
That’s The Donald. In a selfieobsessed society, it’s hard to think of anyone who more embodies these words: “It’s all about me.” ( Apologies to Kanye West.)
And the presumptive presidential nominee of the Republican Party of the United States of America wasn’t done yet. It was soon time for another self- congratulatory tweet: “If we do not get tough and smart real fast, we are not going to have a country anymore. I said this was going to happen — and it is only going to get worse.”
Trump was just getting warmed up. There were political points to be scored. Soon he was calling on President Obama to step down and telling his presumptive Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton, to get out of the race if she couldn’t utter the words “radical Islam.”
I could almost feel Michael Gerson and David Brooks cringing over this callous, tone deaf, totally unpresidential behavior by the face of the party of Abraham Lincoln. A massacre that would take the lives of 49 people, the worst mass shooting in American history, had just taken place. And Trump headed right for the hustings, continuing his drumbeat of criticism of his foes on Monday without skipping a beat.
Gerson, a Washington Post columnist and former speechwriter for former president George W. Bush, and Brooks, a New York Times columnist, have been profiles in principle during the craziness that has been the 2016 Republican presidential primary.
As Trump systematically dispatched his 16 rivals with his unorthodox approach and nativist demagoguery, Gerson and Brooks, both conservatives, have consistently recognized that this is not the time for business as usual. Two other prominent conservative journalists, George Will and Bill Kristol, have been right with them.
As Republican official after Republican official has, reluctantly or not, fallen in line behind Trump, the columnists have repeatedly written that this, as The Dude would say, will not stand. They have recognized that this is a watershed moment for the party they care so much about, and that how you deal with the utterly unqualified Trump will be a momentous decision that could be career- defining. In a column headlined “The party of Lincoln is dying,” Gerson wrote last week, “It is one of those rare times — like the repudiation of Joe McCarthy, or consideration of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, or the Watergate crisis — when the spotlight of history stops on a single decision, and a whole political career is remembered in a single pose. The test here: Can you support, for pragmatic reasons, a presidential candidate who purposely and appeals to racism?”
Mitt Romney, who has steadfastly resisted the idea of buckling under the pressure to endorse Trump, knows that. He deserves respect for his decision, which has earned him his very own Trumpian nickname: “choking dog.” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker Paul Ryan, along with many others, have fallen in line, then found themselves in the embarrassing position of being forced to condemn Trump’s latest outrage. Case in point was the candidate’s racist attack on the judge in the Trump U. case.
In late April, Brooks expressed sentiments similar to Gerson’s. He wrote that GOP leaders were “going down meekly and hoping for a quiet convention. They seem blithely unaware that this is a Joe McCarthy moment. People will be judged by where they stood at this time. Those who walked with Trump will be tainted forever after for the degradation of standards and the general election slaughter.”
Brooks and Gerson have not limited their resistance to their writing. They have also appeared on television expressing their opposition to Trump and their despair over his surprise emergence. Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard, has worked tirelessly if without much success to keep the # NeverTrump movement afloat.
Longtime conservative columnist Will has written that if Trump is nominated, it’s the duty of conservatives to make sure he loses all 50 states. Conservative mainstay National Review devoted an entire issue to the effort to stop Trump.
Our politics is so rancorously divided that it can resemble a contest between two bitter sports rivals. But sometimes something happens that is so far beyond the pale that you have to root against the home team. This is one of them.
Props to some conservative journalists for having the courage of their convictions. consistently