GOPers Fear the Monster They Made

In a piece posted today on the Washington Post Web site, columnist Paul Waldman nicely sums up the nightmare Republicans face as they try desperately to figure out what they can do to prevent off-the-rails presidential candidate Donald Trump from further damaging the GOP’s chances with America’s minority and mainstream voters:

I think there’s something going on here that goes beyond Trump, and beyond the issue of immigration (on which all the Republican candidates have essentially the same position). It’s been said before that Democrats hate their base while Republicans fear their base, and the second part seems to be more true now than ever. The Tea Party experience of the last six years, which helped them win off-year elections and also produced rebellions against incumbent Republicans, has left them living in abject terror of their own voters.

It’s as though the GOP got itself a vicious dog because it was having an argument with its neighbor, only to find that the dog kept biting members of its own family. And now it finds itself tiptoeing around the house, paralyzed by the fear that it might startle the dog and get a set of jaws clamped around its ankle.

READ MORE: “Why Trump’s Surge Among GOP Voters Matters,” by Steve Benen (The Maddow Blog); “How Did This Monster Get Created? The Decades of GOP Lies that Brought Us Donald Trump, Republican Frontrunner,” by Heather Cox Richardson (Salon).