A month or two ago I was about to write a post with the awkward title of “It’s starting to look a lot like Rubio—Not!” because my original post appeared to be overtaken by events, as we say in the biz. Sen. Rubio was struggling, while Jeb Bush was sitting on a mountain of cash. Then there was that Trump thing, which was bound to blow over.
Well, that was then. Today Trump continues to blow up, not over, topping his own excess virtually every week if not every day. With his current “plan” to expel 11 million people, not to mention the repeal (somehow) of the 14th Amendment, he has single-handedly managed to shove the Republican Party to the right on immigration further than anyone would have believed. Even Jeb Bush is saying that he hates “anchor babies”, as he likes to call them.
The stress all this trash talk is causing respectable Republicans is hard to imagine, but you don’t have to try, because Charles Krauthammer shares his pain in “Donald Trump’s fantasy of mass deportation is political poison for the GOP”. While desperately flaunting his own impeccable anti-immigration credentials—claiming to have supported a “Great Wall” since 2006 (like that was a good thing)—Charles reasonably points out that amending the Constitution would be, well, difficult, and deporting 11 million people would be, well, “morally obscene.”1
Who can stand against Trump, and, more to the point, who can undo the damage he has already done? Jeb is looking less and less like the guy. By insisting that it’s okay to use the term “anchor babies,” and also okay to hate them, he’s half-way to repealing the 14th already. Besides, Jeb is looking old, making gaffes, the worst of which is to remind people that he’s George Bush’s brother. Yes, fraternal devotion is admirable in the abstract, but not when the frat is George Bush.
So doesn’t that leave Rubio? He hasn’t been trashing anchor babies, and he is Hispanic. That has to be worth something. And, right now, the Republicans desperately need something that isn’t named Donald Trump.
- The whole “Great Wall” conceit is composed of 10% nonsense and 90% racism. The fact that Charles feels compelled to flaunt his long-standing and undying devotion to it is both amusing and, well, morally obscene. ↩︎
