Bill Straub: McConnell, other GOP leaders appear to be stuck with Trump … no matter what

WASHINGTON – Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell is learning that you can’t be just a little bit pregnant.

Touring the commonwealth last week during the never-ending congressional recess he scheduled, the Louisville lawmaker doubled down on his support for GOP presidential candidate Captain Queeg, aka Donald J. Trump, despite the fact that the campaign of the perhaps-billionaire businessman was blowing up higher than the Bikini Atoll.

Things got so bad that by Tuesday that President Obama, sensing a political opportunity to go in for the kill, called on McConnell and other loyal Republicans to retract their Trump endorsements, asserting quite accurately that the New York wild man is “unfit to serve as president.’’

“There has to be a point at which you say, this is not somebody I can support for president of the United States, even if he purports to be a member of my party,’’ Obama said.

McConnell thus far has remained mum regarding the president’s advice but his support for Trump has remained unretracted, to coin a term, even though he has spent most of the last month openly acknowledging that the man he hopes to stick in the White House is full of beans on everything from NATO to his scurrilous statements about a Muslim mother and father, a Gold Star family, who lost a son in the Iraq conflict.

Indeed, if Captain Queeg has the temperament to serve as the leader of the free world he is going out of his way to hide it. His own words establish that he is simply and obviously not up to the task and that he may be the single worst major party candidate to ever hit the stage.

But Trump retains McConnell’s support and the Senate GOP leader may have reached that ominous point of no return – he’s probably stuck with him.

As Sonny Boy Williamson wailed in “One Way Out,’’ “Lord, I’m foolish to be here in the first place.’’

For McConnell, like everything else in his life, continued support for Trump is a political calculation with little regard about the chaos it may wreck on the country. He’s been down this road before – blocking efforts to address the critical issues of the day while the GOP served in the minority despite any adverse consequences. And the old war horse is at it again, fully aware that Trump’s election likely would lead to eternal crises of devastating proportions.

But for McConnell it’s party before country. The leopard is determined to keep his spots.

Put simply, McConnell and his ilk fear a November electoral avalanche that buries Trump will take the rest of the party with it, thus endangering the Republican majorities currently held in the House and Senate. A system failure of such magnitude may even trickle down to the state house level, which could conceivably lead to problems down the road when legislatures engage in congressional redistricting after the 2020 Census. So he is pumping up The Donald hoping to bolster down ballot races.

Regardless, the current situation raises a key question – what, exactly, would Trump have to do, short of murder in the public square, to lose McConnell’s support?

Trump’s list of atrocities is so long his curriculum vita is beginning to look like a resume pieced together by the writers and editors at Mad Magazine. His racist, bigoted and misogynistic statements, not to mention the all-too-public ridicule of a physically handicapped reporter, are the stuff of infamy, so extreme as to even cause Archie Bunker to blanch.

He wants to prohibit Muslims from entering the country and has even spoken about “registering’’ those already here. He plans to ship 11 million or so aliens here illegally – mostly from Mexico – back across the Rio Grande. His unseemly history with women – characterizing at least one as “a fat pig’’ and another as “a dog.’’ – should be disqualifying all by itself.

“You know, it really doesn’t matter what they write, as long as you’ve got a young and beautiful piece of ass,’’ he said about women at one point.

And he knows less than zero about public policy. Even McConnell acknowledges the wild man “doesn’t know a lot about the issues.’’ He has hinted the U.S. wouldn’t protect other nations in NATO if threatened. He maintains uncomfortably close ties with Russia and has praised that nation’s president, Vladimir Putin. Recently he promised that Russia wouldn’t invade Ukraine when he is president – failing to realize it has already done so.

The list of Trump’s disqualifying statements and positions is massive, yet McConnell and others continue to countenance his racism, his bigotry, his misogyny and his downright stupidity by their endorsement.

As Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid, of Nevada, recently noted, “This shouldn’t be hard. Donald Trump is a sexist and racist man who insults Gold Star parents, stokes fear of Muslims and sows hatred of Latinos. He should not be president and Republican leaders have a moral responsibility to say so.’’

But they won’t. On top of everything McConnell and others fear alienating the one, final constituency Republicans can count on – old white guys.

White men, to put it bluntly, are keeping the Trump campaign afloat. With their status as the colossus that has ruled the republic since its beginnings under siege from black people, brown people, women and others in between, they are lashing out and Trump is their Moses, leading them into the Promised Land.

If there’s one lesson to be learned from the nation’s 240-year history it’s that white guys don’t like to share and they remain unwilling to forfeit the supreme status they have maintained for generation after generation. Now, with events and demographics leading inevitably to a more diverse and expansive culture, white men are waging their Battle of the Bulge – the final, desperate fight before the inescapable conclusion.

It wouldn’t be a surprise if, after all this, Trump receives at least 70 percent of the white male vote. Mitt Romney, the 2012 Republican presidential nominee, who lost to Obama by about 5 million votes, received 59 percent of the white vote. But that total includes white women, even though women overall gave Obama 55 percent of the vote, meaning white men did most of Romney’s heavy lifting. The percentage will certainly be even higher this go-round.

What white men seem to like most about Trump is that he is not “politically correct,’’ thus giving them leave to follow suit. What that generally means is that standards of decency and respect for others are being abandoned wholesale.

In other words, Trump, Captain Queeg is making white males comfortable with their own prejudices. Hence their support.

It’s not that that white men seem to expect Trump to bolster their status as much as they expect him to punish those seeking to gain a greater share of the pie. Muslims and Latinos either need to go back or stay where they belong. African-Americans need to know their place and what better way to refute the advances made by women than to defeat a woman candidate?

Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee, is as well-qualified a contender for the White House as anyone who has come before her. She was a congressional staffer for the Watergate Committee, a U.S. Senator for eight years and Secretary of State for four. She was an A-level lawyer and, oh yeah, first lady for eight years.

But she continues to be portrayed, stereotypically so, as the Dragon Lady from the old Terry and the Pirates comic strip – evil, mysterious and corrupt – with little to support that overall characterization.

Her political foes cast her as crooked – although she’s never been charged with anything – and a liar – even though most of those statements consist of her dancing on the edge to portray herself in a better light. She offers nothing like the outrageous and constant whoppers that drip from Trump’s lips like a leaky faucet.

Clinton has obviously made mistakes – the whole email episode from her time as Secretary of State certainly raises legitimate questions about her judgment and propensity to play by the rules. She is cautious to the extreme and her senseless pursuit of a cone of privacy as a public figure, which led to the email contretemps, is unsettling.

In other words, she ain’t perfect. But to compare her obvious shortcomings to those spoon fed to the public by Trump on a daily basis is the very essence of false equivalency.

McConnell is playing with dynamite with his continued support of Trump. And that pack of matches Captain Queeg holds is simply too close for comfort.

Washington correspondent Bill Straub served 11 years as the Frankfort Bureau chief for The Kentucky Post. He also is the former White House/political correspondent for Scripps Howard News Service. A member of the Kentucky Journalism Hall of Fame, he currently resides in Silver Spring, Maryland, and writes frequently about the federal government and politics. Email him at williamgstraub@gmail.com.