GOP's Refusal To Govern Pays Off Big Time . . . For Democrats (Updated)

I was telling my wife the other day that I think Donald Trump is actually an operative for the Democrats and his mission is to destroy the GOP from within.  Just look at the damage he's doing to the Republican Party right now.  After Trump announced that only Mexican rapists are illegally entering the U.S., just a handful of the 47 GOP candidates currently running for president criticized him for the racist remark and the criticism was tepid at best.

I can understand why Republicans are reluctant to attack Trump on this issue.  After all, a good percentage of Republicans are racist, and a lot of these racist Republicans undoubtedly vote in the primaries.  But what I find hilarious is that this problem could have easily been avoided had Republicans in Congress simply set aside their intense hatred for America's first Black president and passed immigration reform in 2013 and 2014.

But they refused to do so, and now they have Donald Trump and his particular brand of racism to deal with.  The really cool part about all this is that the first GOP presidential debate is just around the corner, and only the top ten Republican presidential candidates can participate in it.  What this means, of course, is that the candidates polling just outside the Top 10 have only two choices:   (1) they can run a normal campaign and not move up in the polling, or (2) they can attempt to "trump Trump" by saying some really crazy shit during the last half of July in the hope of appealing to the Radicalized Right and maybe cracking the Top 10 as a result.

Needless to say, I'm hoping that a lot of them choose the latter course.

UPDATE:  Sean Illing at Salon goes back even further and blames the rise of Fox News for the GOP's Trump Disaster:

Fox News – and the conservative media-industrial complex – have created a Frankenstein. His name is Donald Trump, and his political success is now a huge problem for the Republican Party. In so many ways, Trump’s political existence was inevitable. For years, Fox News and the conservative talk radio machine have played to the populist Tea Party id: fomenting fear, demonizing immigrants, and enabling every nativist anxiety imaginable. Now they’re paying the price. ***

The wonderful irony of all this is that the conservative media have ruined conservative politics, far more than liberals ever did. And the results speak for themselves. It’s true that Fox News has promoted the conservative brand and very likely energized grass-roots conservatism in some sense, but at what cost? The GOP, increasingly, is no longer a national party – it’s confined more and more to the South and to pockets of rural America. ***

Illing also notes that it'll be hard for Fox to dump Trump because he is "a boon for ratings" and the "delightful dolts on Fox and Friends can’t get enough of him."

Ironically, the Democratic Party also can't get enough of Donald Trump.  The Democrats could spend a billion dollars on ads attacking Republicans and still not do as much damage as Trump is doing to the GOP right now.