George Will's Prognosis - It'll Take Chemotherapy for the GOP to Save Itself from Trump

Chaos has caught up with the Republican Party and, while there's never been a better opportunity to indulge in schadenfreude, that would be a terrible mistake. It's important that the American Right have a powerful voice. It's just as important that it be cleansed of the malignancy that has afflicted it for the past three decades, possibly even more.

The utter destruction of America's Right, richly deserved as that may be, is no help to the country, the American people or even its centre-right Democrats.

Of course there's a measure of satisfaction in watching the Republican establishment trying desperately to cover their tracks for what they have wrought for so many years. They didn't allow the camel's nose under their tent, they invited it in, pushing on the haunches from the backside. Now that Larry the Cable Guy pachyderm is in their tent and threatening to take over they're having second thoughts.

One of those complicit in today's GOP fiasco is George Will. Like many of his ilk he passed on every early opportunity to arrest this descent and now wishes to make it all go away. Still, his intellect is sharpened as he tries to drive a stake through the heart of The Donald.

What did Donald Trump have left to lose Sunday night? His dignity? Please. His campaign’s theme? His Cleveland convention was a mini-Nuremberg rally for Republicans whose three-word recipe for making America great again was the shriek “Lock her up!” This presaged his Banana Republican vow to imprison his opponent.

The St. Louis festival of snarls was preceded by the release of a tape that merely provided redundant evidence of what Trump is like when he is being his boisterous self. Nevertheless, the tape sent various Republicans, who until then had discovered nothing to disqualify Trump from the presidency, into paroxysms of theatrical, tactical and synthetic dismay.

Again, the tape revealed nothing about this arrested-development adolescent that today’s righteously recoiling Republicans either did not already know or had no excuse for not knowing. Before the tape reminded the pathologically forgetful of Trump’s feral appetites and deranged sense of entitlement, the staid Economist magazine, holding the subject of Trump at arm’s-length like a soiled sock, reminded readers of this: “When Mr. Trump divorced the first of his three wives, Ivana, he let the New York tabloids know that one reason for the separation was that her breast implants felt all wrong.”

His sexual loutishness is a sufficient reason for defeating him, but it is far down a long list of sufficient reasons. But if it — rather than, say, his enthusiasm for torture even “if it doesn’t work,” or his ignorance of the nuclear triad — is required to prompt some Republicans to have second thoughts about him, so be it.

...Trump is a marvelously efficient acid bath, stripping away his supporters’ surfaces, exposing their skeletal essences. Consider Mike Pence, a favorite of what Republicans devoutly praise as America’s “faith community.” Some of its representatives, their crucifixes glittering in the television lights, are still earnestly explaining the urgency of giving to Trump, who agreed that his daughter is “a piece of ass,” the task of improving America’s coarsened culture.

Because Pence looks relatively presidential when standing next to Trump — talk about defining adequacy down — some Republicans want Trump to slink away, allowing Pence to float to the top of the ticket and represent Republicanism resurrected. This idea ignores a pertinent point: Pence is standing next to Trump.

He salivated for the privilege of being Trump’s poodle, and he expresses his canine devotion in rhetorical treacle about “this good man.” What would a bad man look like to pastor Pence?

Yes, George, your Republican Party has turned into a giant shit sandwich but you did more than your share to make that sandwich and now you're going to have to take a very large bite.This is not the party of Lincoln. You and your fellow creeps - Gingrich and Jindal, Rubio, Cruz, Santorum and Rick Walker and the legion of misanthropes who turn out in swarms to support this man who cannot even speak to them in complete sentences - have torn up Lincoln's party and replaced it with the malignant movement of today.