During the Democratic National Convention in July, Hillary Clinton and President Barack Obama ignited a fierce debate among liberals about how best to campaign against Donald Trump and the GOP in the fall campaign. In their respective primetime speeches, Obama and Clinton were at pains to distinguish Trump’s menacing authoritarianism from the headier traditions of Republicanism and conservative thought.

“Look, we Democrats have always had plenty of differences with the Republican Party, and there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s precisely this contest of idea that pushes our country forward,” Obama said. “But what we heard in Cleveland last week wasn’t particularly Republican—and it sure wasn’t conservative.”

“He’s taken the Republican Party a long way ... from ‘Morning in America’ to ‘Midnight in America,’” Clinton said one night later.



The goal was quite explicitly to reach Republican voters horrified by Trump but uneasy about supporting a Democrat, and lower a ladder for them. By creating a temporary alliance with anti-Trump Republicans, they could put together a maximal coalition, to combat a maximal threat.

That never really came to pass. Trump has shed support among college-educated whites, but in the weeks after the convention the race tightened much more than Clinton expected, and the mass GOP defections she hoped for didn’t materialize. Until, of course, the emergence on Friday of a horrifying videotape in which Trump brags about committing sexual assault with impunity. Suddenly, dozens of Republicans understand the value of creating distance between themselves and Trump. The problem for them is that just as they’ve decided they want as little to do with Trump as possible, Clinton and her allies have decided to pull up the ladder and leave them stranded.