Krugman Eviscerates Republican Establishment: You Made Trump!
Republicans need to stop acting so shocked and upset about the ascendance of Trump, Paul Krugman writes in Monday's column. Establishment darling Marco Rubio, and other "ideological warriors of the right" practice the same sort of paranoid politics tinged with demagogy and tribalism, he points out.
Everyone needs to remember "the glitch heard round the world," Krugman reminds, Marco Rubio's repetitive talking point that Chris Christie so roundly mocked him for.
It went like this: “Let’s dispel with this fiction that Barack Obama doesn’t know what he’s doing. He knows exactly what he’s doing.” The clear, if ungrammatical, implication was that all the bad things Republicans claim have happened under President Obama — in particular, America’s allegedly reduced stature in the world — are the result of a deliberate effort to weaken the nation.
And now the establishment is shocked to see a candidate who basically plays the same game, but without the coyness, the overwhelming front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination. Why?
It has become impossible to rise in the Republican party without subscribing to the right's extremist orthodoxy, which includes, of course, not raising taxes on the wealthy, even though the vast majority of Americans—even Republican voters—are in favor of that common sense measure.
The question then is how does a party with such unpopular policies keep winning elections? Lying and obfuscation is always good, as Krugman points out, but even more effective, as we now see, are, "racial dog whistles and suggestions that Democrats are un-American if not active traitors."
For the underlying assumption behind the establishment strategy was that voters could be fooled again and again: persuaded to vote Republican out of rage against Those People, then ignored after the election while the party pursued its true, plutocrat-friendly priorities. Now comes Mr. Trump, turning the dog whistles into fully audible shouting, and telling the base that it can have the bait without the switch. And the establishment is being destroyed by the monster it created.
But his main target remains the GOP. In short, Mitt Romney et al, you need to stop acting so damn shocked about your frontrunner, and own the horrible monster you built.
