Al Jazeera America
By Naureen Kahn
July 21, 2015
Business
mogul and 2016 Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump seemed to
finally cross the line within his own party when, at a gathering of
Christian conservatives
in Iowa on Saturday, he dismissed and derided the military service of
Arizona Sen. John McCain, who was tortured during a five-year ordeal as a
prisoner of war after being captured by the North Vietnamese in 1967.
“He’s
not a war hero,” Trump said during an onstage interview at the event in
the town of Ames. “He’s a war hero because he was captured. I like
people who weren’t captured.”
Most
of the other GOP contenders quickly registered their objections. "It's
not just absurd, it's offensive. It's ridiculous. And I do think it's a
disqualifier as commander-in-chief,"
Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida said in an interview on CNN.
Former
Texas Gov. Rick Perry, another 2016 candidate from a state with a large
Latino population, had been a vocal critic even before Trump’s attack
on McCain. “I have
a message for my fellow Republicans and the independents who will be
voting in the primary process: What Mr. Trump is offering is not
conservatism, it is Trump-ism — a toxic mix of demagoguery and
nonsense,” Perry said in a statement issued last Thursday.
But
Trump is unbowed. He has been surging in some early polls and has
refused to back down from his criticism of McCain, and the Republican
establishment is worried about
the damage he may be doing to the party’s brand.
“Republicans
like me, we’re all wondering how much further can he go on with this
vanity campaign of his,” said David Payne, a Washington-based Republican
strategist.
“He’s running for himself — not for the party and not for the people. I
think he’s so focused on allowing his personality to drive the
campaign, he will probably continue despite the denunciations.”
But
while Trump’s comments on McCain’s status as a war hero drew immediate
and widespread reprimand from the party, similarly outlandish remarks on
another of Trump’s
favored topics — immigration — have elicited a much more muted response
from the GOP. In announcing his presidential bid, Trump labeled Mexican
immigrants as rapists, criminals and “people that have lots of
problems.”
Lynn
Tramonte, deputy director of America’s Voice, an immigration advocacy
group, criticized the party’s response to this as a double standard.
“They’re
right — you can’t insult war heroes and veterans and walk into the
White House, but you also can’t insult Latino voters and make it through
a general election,”
she said. “Where were they when immigrants and Mexicans were being
attacked? The most you saw was a quiet phone call from [Republican
National Committee Chairman] Reince Priebus to Donald Trump.”
“If they actually disagree with what he’s saying, they need to come out and say it,” Tramonte added.
David
Yepsen, director of the Paul Simon Institute of Public Policy at
Southern Illinois University, said Republican moderates don’t want to
alienate the Trump supporters
they might potentially win over.
“He
says things that a lot of the strong conservatives and tea party types
really love, and I think it’s important to remember how strong
isolationist and nativist political
sentiments are in American politics,” he said. “Mainstream candidates
don’t want to alienate those tea party and nativist conservatives, but
on something like this, there’s no downside to pushing back. It almost
becomes an acceptable way to attack Trump without
getting into the immigration debate.”
Still,
Trump poses a serious challenge for a party trying to rehabilitate its
image with Hispanic voters, an ever-growing and important part of the
American electorate.
“He gets pushback from more moderate Republicans who understand their
party has no future unless it can reach out to Hispanic voters,” Yepsen
said. “It will have an impact on the future — you’re making a lot of
Latino people into Democrats.”
Payne,
meanwhile, said that Trump was destined to self-destruct and that all
other Republicans could do was repudiate his most unhinged comments and
ignore him the rest
of the time. With Trump’s personal fortune being vast enough to keep
his campaign afloat for months, the Republicans may have to deal with
him for much longer than they like.
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