No matter how much Trump embarrasses himself or the GOP, why has the leadership refused to show courage and disavow him?
Tribune Content Agency — June 9, 2016
In 1956, Sen. John F. Kennedy published his masterpiece, “Profiles in Courage,” short biographies of eight United States senators, Republicans and Democrats, who had shown extraordinary courage in their careers, willing to buck the opinions of their party and their constituents in order to do what they thought was right.
What a contrast to today’s Republican leaders, who’ve shown no courage at all in their response to repeated racist comments by GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump. Of course, it started on day one of the Trump campaign, when he characterized all immigrants as rapists and criminals. It continued when he proposed banning all Muslims from entering the United States — both positions he still holds.
But Trump’s outright racism reached a new low with his attack on U.S. District Judge Gonzalo P. Curiel, the presiding judge in the San Diego trial over a class-action lawsuit filed against Trump University, which alleges the so-called university is nothing more than a scam. He could never get a fair trial under Curiel, claimed Trump, because the judge is “Mexican” and Donald Trump wants to build a wall along the border.
Trump refused to back down, even when reporters pointed out that Curiel’s actually an American citizen, born in Indiana. Instead, he doubled down by insisting he couldn’t get a fair trial under a Muslim judge, either. Indeed, Trump has insulted so many people of so many different faiths and ethnicities that, by his logic, he probably couldn’t get a fair trial from anybody. Certainly not from a woman.
His racist, personal attacks against a sitting judge, confirmed unanimously by the Senate, have put GOP leaders in a pickle. After all, Trump’s their newly created presidential nominee. He’s now the head of the Republican Party. They either have to condemn his comments or cave in. So what do they do? In classic political fashion, they do both. And nobody’s proved a bigger hypocrite than House Speaker Paul Ryan.
Unfortunately for Ryan, Trump’s outburst came just as the speaker was trying to unveil a new GOP anti-poverty program. To his dismay, however, at a news conference in Washington’s Anacostia neighborhood, all reporters wanted to ask him about were Trump’s latest comments on Judge Curiel. Which led to the embarrassing scenario of Ryan, surrounded by a group of African-American leaders, denouncing Trump’s remarks as “textbook racism” — while vowing to support him anyway, because he’s the Republican nominee.
