Washington Post (Opinion)
By Joe Scarborough
February 29, 2016
They weren’t hard questions to answer.
“Do you condemn David Duke? And the Ku Klux Klan?”
A
simple “yes” would have worked. But on Sunday, Donald Trump swatted
away the easy answers and instead feigned ignorance about the KKK and
its most infamous grand wizard.
The Republican front-runner’s failure to provide what should have been a
simple answer has raised even more disturbing questions about the man
who is on course to lock down the GOP’s nomination for president.
The
first question is why would Trump pretend to be so ignorant of American
history that he refused to pass judgment on the Ku Klux Klan before
receiving additional information?
What kind of facts could possibly mitigate a century of sins committed
by a violent hate group whose racist crimes terrorized Americans and
placed a shameful blot on this nation’s history?
Why
would the same man who claims to have “the world’s greatest memory” say
“I don’t know anything about David Duke” just two days after he
condemned the former Klansman
in a nationally televised press conference? And with that amazing
memory, how could Donald Trump have forgotten that he himself refused to
run for president as a Reform Party nominee in 2000 because “Klansman”
David Duke was a member of that same party?
These
are questions that have no good answers for a Republican Party on the
verge of nominating a man who sounds more like a Dixiecrat from the
1950s than the kind of
nominee the GOP needs four years after losing Hispanics by 44 percent,
Asian Americans by 47 percent and black Americans by 87 percent.
Sunday’s
distressing performance is just the latest in a string of incidents
that suggest to critics that Donald Trump is using bigotry to fuel his
controversial campaign.
The most explicit of all examples was his December proposal to ban
Muslims from entering the United States. Mika Brzezinski, my “Morning
Joe” co-host, called that political promise “frightening” and our debate
with Trump got so heated that I eventually hung
up on the candidate during the interview.
But
what Mika and I found offensive ended up attracting even more
Republican primary voters to Donald Trump’s campaign. His approval
ratings kept rising over the next
two months, and in last week’s South Carolina primary, 75 percent of
South Carolina’s GOP voters supported that same Muslim ban.
The
day I hung up on Donald Trump, I asked on air, “Is this what Germany
looked like in 1933?” Later, I warned Republicans that Trump’s rhetoric
could lead to a brokered
convention where “the party will kill itself.” But it looks like I
overestimated primary voters in the early GOP contests. A brokered
convention is now just the fantasy of Republican elites and Marco Rubio
fans. The harsher reality is that the next GOP nominee
will be a man who refused to condemn the Ku Klux Klan and one of its
most infamous grand wizards when telling the ugly truth wouldn’t have
cost him a single vote.
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