For my money Donald Trump should have been loudly and clearly disowned by the GOP after he mocked the journalist with the disability at the beginning of the campaign almost a year ago in November 2015.
What a message that would have sent that intolerance would not be tolerated. Of course the sat on their hands and did nothing.
Trump signaled his inhumanity and utter lack of concern for another less fortunate human being that night. Serge Kovaleski has arthrogryposis, which very painfully limits the functioning of his joints.
Trump imitated his awkward hand movements while screaming insults at him.
He then claimed he didn't know him, even though Kovaleski covered him extensively when he was at the Daily News.
“Donald and I were on a first-name basis for years,” Kovaleski said. “I’ve interviewed him in his office,” he added. “I’ve talked to him at press conferences. All in all, I would say around a dozen times, I’ve interacted with him as a reporter while I was at The Daily News.”
It was an horrific thing to do, to hold a disabled person up to ridicule before a live audience of thousands with millions watching at home. Then he denied he ever knew him which he obviously did.
That was the third cock crowing. Calling Mexican rapists, saying John McCain was no war hero and finally sneering at a disabled person surely was the signal to Republicans (this was November 2015) to find a mechanism to remove him from the party.
But no, they forgave and forgot until the next round of Loony Tunes insults with special focus on women and they forgave and forgot again with the honorable exception of men like Mitt Romney.
Now faced with yet another example of why he is unfit for the Oval Office they appear to have put away their “Politics for Dummies” book and begun to cut ties.
Whatever people say about the presidential process, it is an MRI of the soul as Barack Obama’s chief advisor David Axelrod once stated. The examination is forensic and it searches out every weakness relentlessly.
Into this strange new world wandered Donald Trump who had never spent a day in public service and was considered a joke candidate at first.
Yet he proved a master of the art of selling himself and his vision. But underneath the facade was a clearly unhinged personality, which functioned okay in his protected world of taped TV and real estate deals but was no match for the bright lights of the media from all over the world focused on him.
The Republican leadership are now seeking to cast him out like Satan but it is too little too late. Trumpism is what the core of the Republican Party want with its anti-immigrant, anti-trade, anti-women, anti-minorities riff and message.
Twenty years or so ago, Governor Pete Wilson of California tried the same anti-immigrant, anti-minorities push. There has barely been a Republican state wide office holder elected since.
Trump is the Republican party. He is no aberration; he is where they have been going since the time of Newt Gingrich: intolerant, narrow-minded, reactionary.
Now the national party have laid a rotten egg and are about to embalm the hen.
I think lurid sex talk on tapes is the least of their problem.
Trump may be finished, but he will likely drag the party down with him.
Whigs anyone?
Comments