Your obsession with Mexican immigrants has put a cheat and a liar on the path to the White House.
Last night, Donald Trump had his third and final opportunity to debate Hillary Clinton and to show the nation that he’s more worthy of the White House than she is. By early reports, he fell short of that task, and one commentator observes that he pretty much threw in the towel. There is much hand-wringing over his refusal to declare he’ll accept the outcome of the election, but that’s a mere distraction from the broad reality of this sordid election.
America is in an extended economic malaise, one that can easily and accurately be attributed to a government that has grown too big, too intrusive, and too cozy with special interests. America is $20 trillion in debt, a staggering and incomprehensible figure that’s dwarfed (as if that can even be imagined) by the unfunded liabilities of Social Security and Medicare. Government is increasingly hostile to businesses large and small (apart from the aforementioned cozy ones), societal tensions are spiraling ever-upward, our educational system is a mess (thanks to decades of ever-increasing government involvement), our infrastructure is the subject of much handwringing and caterwauling even as the money earmarked for it is spent elsewhere, waste and fraud in our biggest entitlement program exceeds $100 billion per year, our government has been illegally spying on us, and our rights are steadily disappearing.
But, what did the GOP voters pick as their hot-button issue this election? Mexican immigrants.
Euphemize it as you wish, give me the song and dance about how it’s just “illegals” that are the problem, tell me it’s not about their ethnicity – that’s mere deflection. No one’s talking about building a wall on the northern border, and no one has mentioned the 25% of illegals that are not latino. I haven’t heard any anger aimed at Asian illegals or the Eastern European kids who routinely game the system. No, it’s always about those brown folks from south of the border, and while some of you take great pains to distinguish between “legal” and “illegal,” many don’t even bother any more.
To what end? Do you actually think that chasing out a chunk of those 11 million illegals is what’ll turn the nation around? Do you actually think that the nation’s economic woes will be fixed by closing the borders and deporting a few million people?
The southern wall and the associated nativist rhetoric is what shaped the GOP primary. It is what elevated Donald Trump from a side-show to the nomination. It is what forced many of the other candidates to hastily re-craft their messages and jump on the anti-illegal bandwagon. It is what quashed debate about the big issues, it is what gave the Democrats a perfect prod with which to corral the GOP in an ugly direction, it is what put arguably the worst candidate of the 17 who ran for the nomination on the debate stage next to Clinton.
Sure, the partisans and party loyalists have been beating the tribal drum. We’ve heard, endlessly, how Trump won the process (no argument here) and that therefore all good Republicans must vote for him (horse puckey) in order to defeat Clinton. Funny how the message that the top priority was defeating Clinton didn’t carry in the early days of the primary season, when Trump polled worse against her than most of the other candidates. Funny how, when that was pointed out and when other candidates were shown to be far better matchups against Clinton, those “win at all costs” types suddenly found their principles by noting that Candidate X wasn’t “strong” enough on immigration.
Now, when many say their principles won’t let them vote for Trump, those who were so adamant about immigration now demand principles be abandoned in order to beat Clinton, and there are the expected grumblings and finger-pointing at the voters who won’t vote for him.
Sorry, Republicans, this impending loss is your fault for obsessing over a second- or third-tier issue. Of course, you’ve now changed the focus of that obsession to Muslim refugees, but that wasn’t what put Trump on the map, and it wasn’t what gave him the nomination.
While anything is still possible, while there is still time for some big de-railing revelations to resonate with the electorate, and while polls have been spectacularly wrong on some other recent occasions, the odds are very good that Clinton’s going to be our next president.
We warned you, we told you that she was an eminently beatable candidate if you focused on the right issues and ran the right candidate, but did you listen? Of course not.
Republicans, you have no one but yourselves to blame.
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