Live from the Roasterie: : Inside the GOP Implosion and the War to Stop Trump: "What the media is now wrongly defining as the GOP's 'Trump problem'...
is a build up of what we might call 'hate debt' and 'nonsense debt' that has been growing up for years.... Take Trump's plan to deport 11 million people living in the US illegally or build the planned Trump Taj MaWall. As John Kasich has futilely tried to explain in debate after debate, whatever of the rights and wrongs of it, this is simply never going to happen.... in the real world net immigration across the US-Mexico has actually gone into reverse in recent years. More are leaving than coming. But in the Republican/Fox news world, hordes of feral Mexicans are still streaming across the Southern border--hem and a layering of ISIS death squads who fly from Ankara to Belize and then walk to the Arizona border. But this is just the hate and nonsense debt coming due from 2013....
Virtually Trump's entire campaign is built on stuff just like this, whether it's about mass deportation, race, the persecution of Christians, Obamacare, the coming debt crisis and a million other things.... But Republicans can't really dispute.... Can Marco 'Establishment' Rubio really get traction attacking Trump for having no specific plan to replace Obamacare when Republicans have spent the last five years repeatedly voting to repeal Obamacare without ever specifying a plan to replace it with?... The slow accumulation of nonsense and paranoia... built into a massive trap door under the notional GOP leadership with a lever that a canny huckster like Trump could come in and pull pretty much whenever. This is the downside of building party identity around a package of calculated nonsense and comically unrealizable goals....
Until now GOP elites have managed to maintain a balance or needle-threading sleight of hand wherein the GOP had become the functional equivalent of a European rightist party (UKIP or French National Front) yet masqueraded as a conventional center-right party (UK Conservatives or French Republicans)--all under the go-along leadership of the people The Washington Post editorial page imagines run the GOP. But the set up was already under extreme strain, as evidenced by the 2011 debt default drama, the 2013 Cruz shutdown and the end of the Boehner Speakership in 2015. Trump is very little different from the average candidate Republicans elected in 2010 and 2014, in terms of radical views and extreme rhetoric. All he's done is take the actual GOP issue package, turn it up to eleven and put it on a high speed collision course with RNC headquarters smack in the middle of presidential election year.
