Former GOP House Speaker came right out and called it what it is today, when he said that “There is no Republican party, there is the Trump party.” Trump is hell bent to not only take over the GOP, he wants the party to be his own personal property, a political Trump Taj Mahal. And in doing so, he is making it increasingly more difficult for the party to even begin to repair the damage once he finally oozes off.
The Southern Poverty Law Center has already identified 8 candidates running in the 2018 election on a white nationalist platform, and most of them are running as Republicans. This is the highest number that they have been able to track and confirm in their history. And not just in deep south, local districts, they’re all over, including one running for Congress in Chicago, and another vying to run for US Senate against Dianne Feinstein in California.NBC News sent poor Morgan Radford out into the hinterlands to actually suffer the indignity of interviewing some of these knuckleheads. She gave a brief look at her in-depth report on NBC Nightly News on MSNBC this morning.
This is problematic for the GOP for a couple of reasons. First of all, the primaries are normally low turnout affairs, with candidates who can motivate their base carrying the day by default out of apathy. In the Chicago seat, his competition dropped out at the last minute, and he ran unopposed, generating 20,000 votes. Some of these candidates could slip through the primary, while everybody is laughing them off as a joke. Just look at 2016 if you want proof.
But, more critical to the survival of the traditional GOP, they are going to be branded by these candidates. More than one of them have claimed that Trump himself was their inspiration for running. Trump opened the cage, and now these flying monkeys want to soar. Conservatives who turned on the party due to their distaste for Trump will be much more unlikely to return to the fold once he’s gone if they think everybody will automatically cast them as Nazi sympathizers because of what Trump has unleashed.
The GOP itself seems unsure of exactly how to deal with this burgeoning problem. The Illinois GOP came out and forcibly disavowed the candidate, but while the California GOP told Radford that they wanted nothing to do with this idiot, they refused to step in front of her camera and disavow him publicly.
The results can’t do anything but hurt the Republicans. In Illinois, they basically just ceded a seat to the Democrats. In California, they just have to endure the embarrassment, Feinstein is in no danger to a goose-stepping moron. But no matter the results, the media is going to pick up on this, especially after it makes national news tonight on NBC. And if Trump weren’t enough of a cross to bear, now they’re going to have to deal with the mud of being the preferred party for neo-Nazi’s everywhere. And if they’re running in 2018, imagine how many of them there will be in 2020, when Trump is on the ballot.
