John McCain Recognizes That The GOP Is Amply Populated By "Crazies"

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John McCain angered by Donald 

Trump: "He Fired Up The Crazies"

Former presidential candidate and longtime Senator John McCain does not like Donald Trump. He does not like Donald Trump one bit.

“It’s very bad,” McCain, who was eager to talk about Trump, told me on Monday when I stopped by his Senate office. The Senator is up for reëlection in 2016 and he pays close attention to how the issue of immigration is playing in his state. He was particularly rankled by Trump’s rally. “This performance with our friend out in Phoenix is very hurtful to me,” McCain said. “Because what he did was he fired up the crazies.”

For McCain, of course, this is personal. Arizona's far right (aka his own state Republican Party) has had McCain in their sights for years, largely because he does not sufficiently hate immigrants, and for that perceived crime and others he faced a tea party primary challenger in the GOP midterm wave of 2010, and will likely face another this time around. He does not need and does not want Donald Trump spouting Trump's special brand of gilded racism all over the state.

“We have a very extreme element within our Republican Party,” McCain said. He then noted that he was personally censured by Arizona Republicans in January of 2014 and has been fighting to push out the extremists in the state G.O.P. ever since. “We did to some degree regain control of the Party.”

But McCain fears that Trump may be reversing those gains. “Now he galvanized them,” McCain said. “He’s really got them activated.”

Yes. Yes he has. And from the polls, it seems clear that there are great gobs of this "very extreme element" in the party, all of whom are specific fans of Trump's stance that the Mexican government is orchestrating a national campaign to send rapists over our southern border. You know, many of us have warned for some time that the continuing Republican dive into the muck of racism, xenophobia, and outright conspiracy theories would result in a base thoroughly addicted to racism, xenophobia, and outright conspiracy theories. If the Republican Party has hatched a new class of voters mired in theories like "Mexico is sending us their rapists" or "military exercises in Texas are a prelude to martial law" then the blame for it can be placed squarely on prior versions like "Barack Obama may not be a true American" or "the Affordable Care Act contains something called 'Death Panels.'" If Donald Trump is a ridiculous, unknowledgeable figure skating by on a yokel's version of charisma and an as-seen-on-TV version of policy, blame whichever cynical twerp hoisted a glassy-eyed Sarah Palin to that same podium first.

Donald Trump is the candidate the Republican Party tailored itself to produce. He is the candidate that says the things all the other Republicans say, but who is not artful enough to hide their meanings behind the thin curtain of plausible deniability. He is the candidate the Republican base wants, because the Republican base has tired of having to parse out the racist statements and conspiratorial rantings from behind a too-hazy curtain of respectability, and would much prefer to shoot the stuff straight up.