New York Times
(Op-Ed)
By Frank Bruni
July 8, 2015
I
keep reading that Donald Trump is wrecking the Republican Party. I keep
hearing that he’s a threat to the fortunes of every other Republican
presidential candidate,
because he sullies the brand and puts them in an impossible position.
What
bunk. The truth is that he’s an opportunity for them as golden as the
namesake nameplates on his phallic towers, if only they would seize it.
The
brand was plenty sullied before he lent his huff and his hair to the
task. And by giving his Republican rivals a perfect foil, he also gives
them a perfect chance
to rehabilitate and redeem the party.
As it stands now, he’s using them.
If they had any guts, they could use him.
They
could piggyback on the outsize attention that he receives, answering
his unhinged tweets and idiotic utterances with something sane and
smart, knowing that it, too,
would get prominent notice.
They
could define themselves in the starkest possible contrast to him,
calling him out as the bully and bigot that he is. Then he wouldn’t own
the story, because the narrative
would be about cooler heads and kinder hearts in the party staring down
one of its most needlessly divisive ambassadors and saying: Enough. No
more. We’re serious people at the limit of our patience for
provocateurs.
There
was a hint of this last weekend, when Jeb Bush, whose wife is
Mexican-American, lashed out at Trump’s broad-brush comments about
Mexican immigrants crossing into
America with an agenda of drugs and rape.
Bush labeled those remarks “extraordinarily ugly” and “way out of the mainstream” and said that there’s “no tolerance” for them.
But
he didn’t exactly volunteer that assessment. It came in response to a
reporter’s question, and it came more than two weeks after Trump’s
offense.
Neither
he nor Marco Rubio exhibited any hurry in distancing themselves from
Trump, though both of them trumpet their personal biographies as proof
that they’re sensitive
to Latino immigrants.
On
Fox Business on Tuesday, Rubio gave a pathetic master class in cowardly
evasion, stammering his way though an interview in which he was asked
repeatedly for an opinion
about Trump. You would have thought that he was being pressed for
malicious gossip about the Easter bunny.
He
never did manage to upbraid Trump, though he was careful to mention the
“legitimate issue” of border security that Trump had raised.
As
in 2012, Republicans can’t summon the courage to take on the dark
heroes of the party’s lunatic fringe. As in 2012, this could cost them
dearly.
The
Charleston, S.C., church massacre and subsequent debate over the
Confederate flag afforded them an ideal moment to talk with passion and
poetry about racial healing.
But
the leading contenders reacted in fashions either sluggish, terse,
muffled or all three. They showed more interest in fleeing the subject
than in grabbing profitable
hold of it.
Trump’s rant about immigrants, which he has since amplified, was another squandered moment.
Chris
Christie could have made good on his boasts about always telling it
like it is and being unconstrained by politesse. Instead he made clear
that he liked Trump and
considered him a friend. That soft crunching sound you heard was the
supposedly hard-charging New Jersey governor walking on eggshells.
Rand Paul claims the desire and ability to expand the party’s reach to more minorities. So where’s his takedown of Trump?
Bush
has said that a politician must be willing to lose the party’s
nomination in order to win the general election, but that philosophy
can’t end with his allegiance
to the Common Core. It has to include an unblinking acknowledgment of
his party’s craziness whenever and wherever it flares.
Trump’s
hold on voters stems largely from his lack of any filter and from his
directness, traits that they don’t see in establishment candidates. So
his fellow Republicans’
filtered, indirect approach to him just gives him more power.
And while he should be irrelevant, he’s becoming ever more relevant, because he’s exposing their timidity and caution.
They’re wrong to try to ignore him, because the media won’t do that and because he’s probably going to qualify for the debates.
Looking
ahead to the first of them, the conservative pundit George Will bought
into the notion of Trump as an ineradicable pest who “says something
hideously inflammatory,
which is all he knows how to say, and then what do the other nine
people onstage do?”
Oh, please. That’s hardly an existential crisis. It’s a prompt for an overdue smidgen of valor.
Without any hesitation, they tell him that he’s a disgrace. Without any hedging, they tell him that he’s absurd.
It’s the truth. And for the Republican Party, it might just be transformative.
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