So the revelation of the Access Hollywood outtakes from 11 years ago – which NBC presumably has had all along, and which they reportedly explicitly chose to sit on through Sunday’s debate until someone leaked them to the Washington Post first – seems to have done what nothing else could in this asinine and ridiculous political season: forced actual sitting GOP elected officials to bail off the Trump Train. Twelve hours ago it was only Utah, but now all manner of Congresscritters are running like hell from a candidate they backed through his birtherism, his attacks on Muslims and Mexicans, his insults of a Gold Star family, his three marriages and tabloid history, all the things that made “Donald Trump for President’ a spectacular joke and a burlesque of American politics.
Here’s the thing: the deadline to get Trump off the ballot was a month ago and change, depending on what mechanism you choose. Or at the convention. Or at the debates. Or at the very beginning, when the RNC could have dismissed him as a publicity stunt, an attention-seeker, not a serious contender for leader of the free world. But they didn’t, because they couldn’t. Because he’s not a fluke, he’s not a mistake, he’s not some sort of black swan event – he is the natural and inevitable result of a party that nailed its colors to the mast the day that Kevin Phillips published “The Emerging Republican Majority.” Lee Atwater, Rush Limbaugh, Karl Rove, Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck – all signposts on the road to Trump, betting the house – and the kids’ college money and the next month’s groceries and ultimately blood, kidneys and semen – on the eternal preeminence of Archie Bunker as Real True American.
That’s why nothing mattered until now. Muslims didn’t matter. Latinos didn’t matter. African-Americans sure as hell didn’t matter. And the womenfolk would do whatever their husbands told them, see? Except for the feminazis and the diesel dykes and the hairy-legged hippies, and who cares what they want, right boys? Except this time, they didn’t piss off and dismiss one demographic group or another – never mind that while merely sloughing off Asians or Arabs or Mexicans or Muslims alone might not be a dealbreaker, dissing all of them meant you had to win all the white people. And ultimately, that’s where Trump’s cunning plan falls apart – because Trump always assumed that all the white people thought just like him.
And now, on top of everybody else, he’s pissed directly at fifty percent of the population.
It’s not a coincidence, and it’s not a mistake by his lights. After all, Obama running for the White House uncorked eight years of race-hate on a scale not seen since the “New South” tamped down the overt racism in the 1970s. It only stands to reason that putting Hillary at the top of the ticket would pop the cork on 190-proof misogyny, and the idea that Trump knew how to put a woman in her place was at some level a big part of his appeal for the base that put him on stage in Cleveland.
And now the rats are starting to flee the ship, now that it’s been torpedoed at the waterline. Don’t applaud them. They deserve to drown. Ask them why it took until now. The GOP is hanging onto the edge of a cliff by its fingertips. It is our responsibility, for the good of the nation, to lace up the steel-toes and stomp. Hard. Every day from now until November 8, and every day after that.
What are you prepared to do?