Roger Ailes has called it quits, thereby clearing Trump's path to the nomination. I have to say, I'm shocked. I guess I'm one of those old timers who continues to expect common sense and rationality to eventually prevail. When it comes to the GOP nomination this year, that type of thinking is clearly useless.
Jonathan Chait has a perceptive summation the Trump threat to the GOP's 2016 prospects:
"...The significance of his performance lies in his deadly serious threat to run a third-party campaign, siphoning off the immigrant-haters and amorphously angry blue-collar whites the actual nominee will need for himself. The intense barrage of pointed questions displayed how seriously Roger Ailes takes Trump's threat to hijack the GOP for his own end. It failed to reckon with the other threat: that the Republican plan to drive Trump from their party might instead work all too well."
I've come to accept that the Republican establishments only chance of getting rid of Donald Trump is to get him to self implode - since not one of these professed leaders will ever take him on. The best they can do is lob a few personal attacks at him, tsk tsk his tone, and (dare I say it?) point out how un-PC he is. What they don't do is call out his policy or the substance of his comments.
When Trump made his remarks about Mexican immigrants and the GOP feigned outrage he said, "The crime is raging and it’s violent. And if you talk about it, it’s racist.” Ooh, that line is straight out of the Republican playbook. In GOPland, being called a racist is a gazillion times worse than being a racist.
When Trump said, “He’s (John McCain) not a war hero. He’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.” the Republican establishment thought, "Ah ha! Now we've got him!" What they ignored was the fact that Republicans are quite comfortable in not supporting all the troops. Swiftboating and booing a gay serviceman is a-okay with them.
Which brings us to Trump's remarks about Megyn Kelly.