Trump Is, Indeed, a Republican; Face It

What is it about bullying, bigotry, racism, and misogyny that the Republicans find hard to swallow as members of the Grand Old Party? First, Speaker of the House Paul Ryan called out Donald Trump for saying he would ban all Muslims from entering the U.S. Then he rebuked Trump for taking hours to disavow David Duke, the former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan and his white supremacist followers who endorsed Trump. Trump’s real name is Drumpf, by the way; he’s of German heritage. John Oliver, the satirist, deserves a tip of the hat for digging that up.

Regarding the tradition of bigotry in the Republican Party, let’s not forget where Ronald Reagan, the patron saint of the GOP, began his campaign for president: Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three civil rights workers were murdered and buried in a dam by folks who, if they weren’t the Ku Klux Klan, believed in many of the same principles of bigotry and hate that the KKK believes in.

Racism is a new thing in the Republican Party? Really?

How about misogyny? Surely Republicans remember the Hillary Clinton nutcracker, with Hillary in a plastic pantsuit with razor blade thighs, sold in airports and still on sale in disgusting catalogs I recently threw across the room and then recycled over the 2015 Christmas holiday season.

Donald Trump is so thin-skinned that when Megyn Kelly of Fox News asked him tough questions about his treatment of women he started attacking her for “bleeding from wherever,” referring to her alleged feminine frailty of being emotional during her alleged menstrual period at the time her questions were asked. He can’t take criticism and he hits below the belt, literally, when he gets asked tough questions.

It’s enough that Drumpf has discardable wives, each younger and more attractive than the previous wives. And he himself is 69. His discardable wives alone would paint him as something of a misogynist.

Former presidential candidate Jeb Bush vowed that Trump couldn’t “insult his way to the presidency,” but that’s what he’s doing. Jeb Bush couldn’t buy the Republican nomination, as it turned out, and he sure did try. He had over $100 million in his Right to Rise super-pac.

And instead of repudiating Drumpf’s loathesome style of bullying his opponents, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) is trying to out-insult Trump. It simply can’t be done! And insults hardly become Rubio as the so-called “establishment” candidate. He looks less and less like a serious candidate every day, and he’s only carried one state so far: Minnesota.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) carried three states on Super Tuesday: Alaska, Oklahoma, and his home state of Texas. He won Iowa earlier, despite Gov. Terry Branstad’s denouncement of his candidacy because Cruz, a Texan, is an oil man who is against the Renewable Fuel Standard subsidies for farmers who grow corn in Iowa and elsewhere for ethanol. Never mind that the oil industry also receives taxpayer-funded subsidies.

Drumpf carried seven states on Super Tuesday: Alabama, Georgia, Arkansas, Tennessee, Virginia, Massachusetts, and Vermont.

Hillary Clinton swept the Southern States on the Democratic side. She too won seven states: Texas, Virginia, Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, Arkansas (where she was once First Lady when Bill was governor there), and Massachusetts, a state Bernie Sanders hoped to win.

Democrat Bernie Sanders surprised me. He carried four states: Colorado, Minnesota, Oklahoma, and his home state of Vermont.

Yay Bernie!

Both Bernie Sanders supporters and anyone-but-Trump supporters are both panicking. As the Russian spy said in “Bridge of Spies,” every time Tom Hanks presented the spy with a worst case scenario and asked him if he was worried, the Russian spy always said, deadpan, “Would it help?”

I’m so glad Mark Rylance, who played the Russian spy, won best supporting actor at the Academy Awards. He had a deadpan fatalism that we would do well to cultivate. You can rend your garments and tear your hair over the election results so far, but you need to ask yourself, “Would it help?”

Remember too, there are 35 states left who haven't voted or caucused.