What happened
The Republican presidential race
descended further into disarray
this week, as Donald Trump and
Sen. Ted Cruz became embroiled
in a bitter clash over their wives,
Trump’s campaign manager was
charged with battery, and all three
remaining candidates walked back
their pledge to back whoever wins
the party’s nomination. The spousal
spat began last week when an anti-
Trump Super PAC sent out a nude
picture from Melania Trump’s modeling
days to Utah voters, suggesting
that she wouldn’t make an appropriate
first lady and urging voters
to back Cruz. In response, Trump
retweeted an unflattering image of
Cruz’s wife, Heidi, juxtaposed with a flattering shot of Melania.
Cruz called Trump a “sniveling coward,” and told the front-runner
to “leave Heidi the hell alone.” The National Enquirer then published
a piece accusing Cruz of having affairs with five women. The
Texas senator denounced the unsubstantiated allegations as “complete
and utter lies,” and accused Trump, a friend of the magazine’s
owner, of being behind the “tabloid smear.” Trump denied any
involvement, but added that the Enquirer was “right about O.J.
Simpson, John Edwards, and many others.”
Trump caused a fresh uproar by saying that he wants to see a ban
on abortion and “there has to be some form of punishment” for
women who get one illegally; he quickly backed off that statement.
But the real estate mogul doubled down on his defense of
his campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, after he was charged
with grabbing and bruising a female journalist at a campaign event
in Florida. As his bad blood with Cruz escalated, Trump rescinded
his pledge to support the Republican nominee, saying he was being
treated “unfairly” by the Republican establishment. Cruz said he
would not support “someone who attacks my wife,” and Ohio
Gov. John Kasich suggested he, too, might not back the nominee
What the editorials said
“We thought the race for president couldn’t get any cruder” than
when Donald Trump told voters there
was “no problem” with the size of his
penis, said USA Today. But his mockery
of Heidi Cruz’s physical appearance
marked an “astonishing new low in
American politics.” As for the National
Enquirer hit job, it’s easy to see why
Cruz thinks Trump was responsible—
the only person the article quoted was
Roger Stone, a former Trump staffer
known for political dirty tricks.
Cruz isn’t an innocent victim, said
the Los Angeles Times. Unwilling to
alienate Trump’s many supporters, the
ambitious senator has “looked the other
way” when the front-runner “insulted
other candidates, journalists, even entire
populations.” It is only now that Cruz’s
own family is in the spotlight
that he has “recovered his sense
of outrage.”
Trump’s passionate defense
of Lewandowski tells us a lot
about his character, said The
Washington Post. Had he
simply acknowledged what
happened and apologized, that
would “likely have ended the
matter.” Instead, he portrayed
the reporter as a liar, and even
when police released a video
clearly showing Lewandowski
grabbing the reporter’s arm,
Trump said, “Look at the
tapes—nothing there.” No one
with such a brazen willingness
to “overlook fact and evidence” belongs in the Oval Office
What the columnists said
“Donald Trump holds one core belief,” said Franklin Foer in Slate
.com. “Misogyny.” Throughout his decades in the public eye, he has
made it clear that he views women as “meat”—prizes to be won in
a male war of domination. He has boasted of his experiences with
“seemingly very happily married and important women,” openly
cheated on his first wife, and called his second wife “a nice piece
of a--.” He disparages women who dare stand up to his bullying—
including Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly, former rival Carly Fiorina,
and numerous female journalists—with personal insults, calling
them “fat,” “ugly,” or “disgusting.” I used to reject the “Democratic
trope that the GOP was waging war on women,” said Kathleen
Parker in The Washington Post. Not anymore. If Republicans
cannot bring themselves to condemn their front- runner’s disgusting
verbal attacks on women, “they are by their silence complicit.
Republicans now find themselves engulfed in “utter, bone-chilling,
sickness-inducing panic,” said John Podhoretz in the New York
Post. If Trump is the GOP nominee, he will cost them scores of
Senate and House seats, and will hurt candidates for state legislatures,
too. Trump is turning the gender gap favoring Democrats
“into an abyss deeper than the San Marianas Trench”—he is
currently viewed unfavorably by an
astonishing 70 percent of women.
The front-runner thinks he can win in
November by energizing a “stampede”
of white male voters—but he’ll send so
many angry women and Hispanics to
the polls that he couldn’t possibly win.
The GOP is “a fractured party splitting
even further apart,” said Sahil Kapur in
Bloomberg.com. Now that the candidates’
loyalty pledge is dead, it’s doubtful
that “the GOP is capable of uniting”
its three camps—Trump’s nativists and
nationalists, Cruz’s ideological conservatives,
and Kasich’s moderates. How can
Trump or Cruz beat the Democratic
nominee without the support of one or
two of those segments?
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