The Boston Globe is making its opposition to — and fears of — billionaire-showman Donald Trump in a double whammy. It’s Sunday cover gives its satirical vision of what will happen under the Republican presidential front-runner’s presidency. And it has a powerful editorial”The GOP must stop Trump.”
The fake front page announces the beginning of deportions and has headlines such as: “President Trump calls for tripling ICE force; riots continue” and “US soldiers refuse orders to kill ISIS families.”
The Globe’s editorial is quite powerful — and it’s worth look at in detail, and offering a few thoughts:
DONALD J. TRUMP’S VISION for the future of our nation is as deeply disturbing as it is profoundly un-American.
It is easy to find historical antecedents. The rise of demagogic strongmen is an all too common phenomenon on our small planet. And what marks each of those dark episodes is a failure to fathom where a leader’s vision leads, to carry rhetoric to its logical conclusion. The satirical front page of this section attempts to do just that, to envision what America looks like with Trump in the White House.
We have seen this in many countries, although the example of Hitler is the most extreme. Yours truly (who lost many members of my grandfather’s Ravinsky family who were wiped out by the Nazis in Russia) is a student of Hitler and Nazism. That example often is a turn off because (so far) no one is accusing Trump of having a grand plan to physically annihilate a whole people and conquer the world. But he is an example of the strongman who’s all “I I I I” who triggers, exploits, and accentuates latent and overt resentments, rages and bigotry to forge a coalition fueled by hate as well as real and/or perceived economic government failures. MORE:
It is an exercise in taking a man at his word. And his vision of America promises to be as appalling in real life as it is in black and white on the page. It is a vision that demands an active and engaged opposition. It requires an opposition as focused on denying Trump the White House as the candidate is flippant and reckless about securing it.
The Globe notes how Trump is arguing he deserves the nomination even if he doesn’t get to the required numbers and has warned of riots. MORE:
But then nothing about the billionaire real estate developer’s quest for the nation’s highest office has been pretty. He winks and nods at political violence at his rallies. He says he wants to “open up” libel laws to punish critics in the news media and calls them “scum.” He promised to shut out an entire class of immigrants and visitors to the United States on the sole basis of their religion.
The toxic mix of violent intimidation, hostility to criticism, and explicit scapegoating of minorities shows a political movement is taking hold in America. If Trump were a politician running such a campaign in a foreign country right now, the US State Department would probably be condemning him.
The Globe notes that there are rumblings to stop Trump:
Realizing that the party faces a double bind, a few conservatives have been clear-eyed enough to see the need for a plausible, honorable alternative that could emerge from the likely contested convention. Names like Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney have come up. If no candidate gets a majority on the convention’s first ballot, such a nomination might be theoretically possible.
This would have no modern precedent: Ordinarily, parties put aside their differences after primaries and rally to the front-runner because they share basic common goals and values. In any other election cycle, anti-Trump Republicans would just look like sore losers. But Trump lacks those common values — not just the values of Republicans but, it becomes clearer every day, those of Democrats.
And, the paper argues, the GOP needs to do some soul searching:
At some point, after the election, Republicans will also need to ask themselves some tough questions about how their actions and inactions made the party vulnerable to Trump. After all, a candidate spewing anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, authoritarian rhetoric didn’t come out of nowhere; the Tea Party has been strong enough long enough that someone like him shouldn’t be a surprise. Chasing short-term political gains, the GOP missed a lot of chances to fight the hateful currents that now threaten to overwhelm it.
For now, Republicans ought to focus on doing the right thing: putting up every legitimate roadblock to Trump that they can. Unexpectedly, a key moment in American democracy has snuck up on the GOP. When he denounced Trump, Romney said he wanted to be able to say he’d fought the good fight against a demagogue. That’s the test other Republicans may want to consider.
Action doesn’t mean political chicanery or subterfuge. It doesn’t mean settling for an equally extreme — and perhaps more dangerous — nominee in Ted Cruz. If the party can muster the courage to reject its first-place finisher, rejecting the runner-up should be even easier.
The Republican Party’s standard deserves to be hoisted by an honorable and decent man, like Romney or Ryan, elected on the convention floor. It is better to lose with principle than to accept a dangerous deal from a demagogue.
But we’re not seeing that on all GOP fronts.
We’ve seen people like former Mayor Rudy Guiliani, who long ago destroyed his 9/11 era nickname “America’s mayor, and other politicos make it clear they’re with Trump.
We’ve seen some highly influential conservative talk show hosts who all but overtly support him, bury their initial skepticism once they see their audience likes him and then in effect all but endorse him to stay in sync with their audience, or other Republican talkers or officials make it clear if he gets the nomination their goal is partisan winning so they’ll go all out for Trump. Some cite a need to stop Hillary Clinton, who has been around long enough so that projecting her president would indicate it wouldn’t be out of the U.S political norm. Or some cite stopping Bernie Sanders, who they label a “communist,” when they know full well he is nothing of the sort.
There’s the book “Of Mice and Men.
Today in the GOP we’re still seeing an awful lot of mice.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.