This from the Paul Krugman column in today's New York Times. Please follow link to original.
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As
many people are pointing out, Republicans now trying to distance
themselves from Donald Trump need to explain why The Tape was a breaking
point, when so many previous incidents weren’t. On Saturday, explaining
why he was withdrawing his endorsement, Senator John McCain cited
“comments on prisoners of war, the Khan Gold Star family, Judge Curiel
and earlier inappropriate comments about women” — and that leaves out
Mexicans as rapists, calls for a Muslim ban, and much more. So, Senator
McCain, what took you so long?
One
excuse we’re now hearing is that the new revelations are qualitatively
different — that disrespect for women is one thing, but boasting about
sexual assault brings it to another level. It’s a weak defense, since
Mr. Trump has in effect been promising violence against minorities all
along. His insistence last week that the Central Park Five, who were
exonerated by DNA evidence, were guilty and should have been executed
was even worse than The Tape, but drew hardly any denunciations from his
party.
And
even if you consider sexual predation somehow uniquely unacceptable,
you have to ask where all these pearl-clutching Republicans were back in
August, when Roger Ailes — freshly fired from Fox News over horrifying
evidence that he used his position to force women into sexual
relationships — joined the Trump campaign as a senior adviser. Were there any protests at all from senior G.O.P. figures?
Of
course, we know the answer: The latest scandal upset Republicans, when
previous scandals didn’t, because the candidate’s campaign was already
in free fall. You can even see it in the numbers: The probability of a
House Republican jumping
off the Trump train is strongly related to the Obama share of a
district’s vote in 2012. That is, Republicans in competitive districts
are outraged by Mr. Trump’s behavior; those in safe seats seem oddly
indifferent.
Meanwhile,
the Trump-Ailes axis of abuse raises another question: Is sexual
predation by senior political figures — which Mr. Ailes certainly was,
even if he pretended to be in the journalism business — a partisan
phenomenon?
Just
to be clear, I’m not talking about bad behavior in general, which
occurs among politicians (and people) of all political leanings. Yes,
Bill Clinton had affairs; but there’s a world of difference between
consensual sex, however inappropriate, and abuse of power to force those
less powerful to accept your urges. That’s infinitely worse — and it
happens more than we’d like to think.
Take,
for example, what we now know about what was happening politically in
2006, a year that Nate Cohn, The Times’s polling expert, suggests offers
some lessons for this year. As Mr. Cohn points out, as late as
September of that year it looked as if Republicans might retain control
of Congress despite public revulsion at the Bush administration. But
then came the Foley scandal:
A member of Congress, Representative Mark Foley, had been sending
sexually explicit messages to pages, and his party had failed to take
any action despite warnings. As Mr. Cohn points out, the scandal seems to have broken the dam, and led to a Democratic wave.
But think about how much bigger that wave might have been if voters had known what we know now: that Dennis Hastert, who had been speaker of the House since 1999, himself had a long history of molesting teenage boys.
Why
do all these stories involve Republicans? One answer may be structural.
The G.O.P. is, or was until this election, a monolithic, hierarchical
institution, in which powerful men could cover up their sins much better
than they could in the far looser Democratic coalition.
There
is also, I’d suggest, an underlying cynicism that pervades the
Republican elite. We’re talking about a party that has long exploited
white backlash to mobilize working-class voters, while enacting policies
that actually hurt those voters but benefit the wealthy. Anyone
participating in that scam — which is what it is — has to have the sense
that politics is a sphere in which you can get away with a lot if you
have the right connections. So in a way it’s not surprising if a
disproportionate number of major players feel empowered to abuse their
position.
Which brings us back to the man almost all senior Republicans were supporting for president until a day or two ago.
Assuming
that Mr. Trump loses, many Republicans will try to pretend that he was a
complete outlier, unrepresentative of the party. But he isn’t. He won
the nomination fair and square, chosen by voters who had a pretty good
idea of who he was. He had solid establishment support until very late
in the game. And his vices are, dare we say, very much in line with his
party’s recent tradition.
Mr. Trump, in other words, isn’t so much an anomaly as he is a pure distillation of his party’s modern essence.
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