Gutterdammerung

Senator Ted Cruz in a reflective moment

Here’s a good summary from Tim Alberta of NR on what yesterday’s latest unpleasantness means for the GOP and its various standard-bearers after November 8:

It’s not just the party leadership in Washington that’s showing no appetite for taking on Trump. A whole host of Republican senators, including nearly all of those facing reelection next month, issued statements Friday night expressing outrage at the nominee’s remarks. They came from: Arizona’s John McCain; North Carolina’s Richard Burr; Pennsylvania’s Pat Toomey; New Hampshire’s Kelly Ayotte; and Ohio’s Rob Portman, among others. But not one of these senators announced any kind of opposition to Trump — whether by withdrawing their support or by calling on him to step down as the nominee. . .

Where this will prove stubbornly problematic for the GOP is in its efforts to distance itself from Trump on November 9, over the ensuing four years, and perhaps much longer. In Congress and on the campaign trail, Republicans will attempt to turn the page on an ugly chapter in their party’s history, and they will do so by arguing that they had nothing to do with Trump’s ascent. They will claim that he was never their first choice, that he wasn’t a conservative, and that they only supported him because it was a binary choice between him and Hillary Clinton. But it won’t be an easy pitch, given how many of them have been on record excusing and enabling his behavior — and how many more have refused obvious opportunities to abandon ship, including the tape incident of October 7.

That’s a short part of a long and devastating pol by pol indictment (The specific bits about Cruz, Rubio, and Pence constitute 180-proof schadenfreude for progressives, so please surf responsibly).

What’s particularly fascinating to me about yesterday is the specific question of why the video has caused such an outcry, and especially why that outcry has caused something like a full-scale panic among GOP elites. The video reveals absolutely nothing new about Trump, after all. His lifelong misogyny and taste for harassing (and probably much worse) behavior towards women was already approximately as well documented as Brangelina’s marriage.

I mean what’s worse, these comments, or boasting publicly on several occasions that you would like to rape your own daughter? (I’m assuming that Ivanka would not consider such congress to be consensual).

So why now? What makes this the proverbial straw, if it is that? For crying out loud, Trump made two other PUBLIC STATEMENTS YESTERDAY that, to my mind at least, were every bit as horrifying and disqualifying as these eleven-year-old private comments. What is it about this that seems for the moment at least to represent some sort of tipping point?