The face and little fingers of the Republican Party

Republican insiders are so desperate to stop Donald Trump from winning their presidential nomination that they’re coalescing around Marco Rubio. Think about that. A guy who rarely shows up for work, has an agenda that’s almost as extreme as Trump’s, and who even the most expensive image-makers in the world will never make fit for prime time, is their last best hope. A guy who hasn’t yet come close to winning anything, and is polling far behind everywhere, is somehow supposed to win everything.

For decades the Republican establishment has played the faith-based voters for fools, but now it is they who are looking increasingly foolish in their desperate search for faith. They have no one to blame but themselves. For decades, they have played to racism, misogyny, bigotry, and thuggishness, and having loosed the American id, it’s now theirs to live with, untamed, unfettered, and out in the open where they never wanted it to be. It’s a monster of their own making. As Mitt Romney might say: They built that.

It’s been written about before and bears repeating, again and again: This is the inevitable end of a process that has been evolving for decades. Republicans like to pretend they are the Party of Lincoln, but that was not just more than 150 years ago—it was an entirely different political universe. The Republican Party was founded to oppose slavery, but now 20 percent of the supporters of its leading presidential candidate think freeing the enslaved was a bad idea. Trump himself openly laughs at the extremism his followers openly embrace. And all of it is the fault of the Republican Party establishment.

If not for his long, bombastic personal history proving that he means every bit of it, one almost might wonder if Trump is just trolling the Republicans, making them see what they have become. But the history is there. Trump is what he is. His followers are what they are. And the Republican establishment did what it did.