So, Donald Trump Went Too Far?

I doubt if his nasty remark about Mrs. Khan will lose him any votes he was already going to get. It might not get him any more, but I doubt it will lose what he already has. But why are people acting like Donald Trump is a disgusting aberration? He's the very embodiment of the right wing.

[S]o much of the commentary on the GOP presidential candidate [...] focuses on the person—and the novelty—of Donald Trump rather than on the party and the movement that produced him.

Countering that amnesia doesn’t require any elaborate education in American history; simply recall three moments of recent memory.

In 2002, Georgia’s Democratic senator Max Cleland—a Vietnam vet who had his two legs and part of his arm torn to shreds by a grenade, leaving him in a wheelchair for life, his two legs and part of his arm amputated—lost his Senate seat to Saxby Chambliss. Why? Despite Cleland’s lead in the polls, Chambliss (who went onto serve in the Senate for two terms as an esteemed Republican, for Saxby is an honorable man) ran television ads questioning Cleland’s patriotism (complete with likenesses of Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden). The man had given his two legs and part of his arm to this country, but the Republican Party saw fit to back a candidate, and subsequently a two-term senator, who questioned Cleland’s patriotic commitments.

In 2004, the Republican shadow apparatus ran an entire campaign against John Kerry’s war record, claiming that despite his winning of a Bronze Star and Silver Star for what he did in Vietnam, despite the fact that he had put himself into considerable danger to help save his unit, Kerry actually betrayed his country. Not just when he returned from Vietnam and helped lead the opposition to the war, but also while he was fighting the war, putting his life at risk. That these ads were made on behalf of a candidate who used his family connections to get out of fighting that war only added to the indecency.

That same year, Cindy Sheehan‘s son Casey was killed while serving in Iraq. She soon began protesting the war and George W. Bush, camping outside his ranch in Crawford for weeks on end to highlight what had happened to her son and the injustice and folly of the war. Bill O’Reilly said:

I think Mrs. Sheehan bears some responsibility…for the other American families who lost sons and daughters in Iraq who feel this kind of behavior borders on treasonous.

[...]

Here we have an instance of a Democratic presidential candidate, a sitting Democratic senator, and a prominent antiwar activist — all with stories of patriotic, almost unthinkable sacrifice — subjected to a pattern and practice of humiliating, disgusting slurs and smears. By figures high and low in — and near and only slightly less near to — the Republican Party.

That we can sit here and act as if Donald Trump’s indecency is a singular pathology rather than a systemic mode of politics, that we can treat his arrival on the scene as a novelty and innovation rather than the logical outgrowth of years of right-wing revanchism, [...] that is itself a kind of collusion, an erasure of the past, a collusion with indecency.

  Corey Robin

Amen.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.