In the last couple of days, we’ve seen the Republican nominee for President of the United States go to war with his own party, including the Republican currently two heartbeats from the Presidency, Speaker of the House Paul Ryan.
The Enemy of My Enemy Is My Enemy
Ryan has distanced himself from Donald Trump’s election efforts, explicitly to try and save the downballot races and, by extension, his own Speakership. Even if they manage to install a Republican majority in the House, the uneasy coalition between the genuinely evil nutjob wing and the merely amoral centrist Republicans that gave him his seat is unlikely to hold, given the open war between those factions.
For his part, Trump seeks to exploit the dichotomy between the two to settle scores with anyone he’s ever perceived as giving him anything less than full-throated, bay-at-the-moon support, starting with the Republicans who initially withheld that support for reasons of conscience, politics or disdain – Republicans like Ryan and John McCain.
The pause between the early wins of the Nazi Wehrmacht in 1939, and the eventual invasion and capitulation of France in 1940 has been called the “Sitzkrieg.” There had been a similar suspension of all-out GOP civil war after the Reich wing of the party defeated Eric Cantor, then ran off Speaker John Boehner and his next obvious successor, Kevin McCarthy. The uneasy truce reached to install former VP candidate Ryan as the new Speaker produced and enduring Sitzkrieg – until Trump began to unravel.
Ryan has consistently tried to appear to strike a thoughtful, balanced pose in order to hold his fragile coalition together. It’s been a constant struggle for him to appear judicious, sufficiently partisan, and serious, all while fending the Teabaggers off with a whip and the Chair. But Trump has posed him with an insoluble puzzle: how to maintain a viable Republican majority now that the Teabaggers are driving the electoral bus.
Like a man caught between two stools, Ryan has tried to keep the stool to his left engaged and voting, while simultaneously trying to keep the stool sample on his right from becoming a cesspool of Donarrhea by, for example, still endorsing Trump.
Paul Ryan failed. History will not be kind.
Now an “unshackled” Trump is going to wreak vengeance on anyone and everyone that he perceives as having slighted him, from Alicia Machado and the Khans, to Hillary and Bill Clinton, to Paul Ryan and John McCain. His ego, as puffed up and insubstantial as cotton candy, will allow nothing less than burning down the entire electoral process in America, simply because it failed to genuflect and capitulate to his magnificent awfulness.
At this moment, with the Party Formerly Known as Republican going to war with itself and everyone else, it is impossible to foretell exactly what the outcome of November 8 will be, except to reiterate that it was exactly Trump being Trump that made Hillary a mortal lock 5 months ago. It seems likely, but by no means certain, that the Senate will turn blue. It seems possible, but still a little unlikely, that the House could, too. But right now, more than ever before, it is impossible to tell who is a “likely voter” or, if a Republican is a likely voter, whom they are likely to vote for.
Which makes it EVEN MORE IMPORTANT that Democrats get out and vote. The Republican implosion alone will not guarantee that President Hillary Clinton will have the Congress we need in order to start returning this country’s government to some semblance of normalcy. It is imperative that we inoculate the Senate AND the House, both, against the rotaviral shitstorm that is the Republican Civil War.
To save us all from the crazy: VOTE!
A candidate for New York State Senate has sparked a firestorm in Harlem after telling NBC 4 New York’s I-Team he was planning to hand out “Kool Aid, KFC and watermelons” at a campaign event in the primarily black community.
