It’s time for GOP leaders to choose sides on Donald Trump [View all]

[applegrove]

It’s time for GOP leaders to choose sides on Donald Trump

By Chris Cillizza at the Washington Post

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/06/07/republicans-need-to-think-very-hard-on-whether-they-can-live-with-donald-trump-for-5-more-months/

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Donald Trump has been the Republican presidential nominee for five weeks as of Tuesday. Those 35 days have been filled with self-inflicted wounds — the latest being Trump's insistence that a judge of Mexican descent is biased against him because Trump has said he would build a wall between the United States and Mexico if he is elected — and mounting evidence that the real estate mogul has absolutely no plans to change the brash and bullying approach that won him the GOP primary.

The realization is setting in among GOP leaders that the way Trump has acted as the party's nominee has the potential not only to cost Republicans the White House in 2016 but also to damage the party's brand among key constituencies — Hispanics, most obviously — that could set them back for far longer than a single election cycle.

“If anybody was looking for an off-ramp, this is probably it,” Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) said in the New York Times on Tuesday. “There’ll come a time when the love of country will trump hatred of Hillary.”

He's right. For party leaders who've lined up with Trump amid polling that suggested he was running surprisingly competitively against Democrat Hillary Clinton, the time is rapidly approaching to either hop off the Trump train or decide you are riding it all the way to Nov. 8.



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