Well, just when our political scene seemed as if it couldn’t possibly get any crazier, it did.
Truth be told, the newest revelations about Donald Trump’s remarks back in 2005, reducing women to sex objects, didn’t really tell me much about the kind of man Trump is that I didn’t already know, and I would have had no way of knowing how much of a difference they would make to the Republican establishment than all the many things we already knew about him before. But according to the latest reports, Republicans are deserting their party’s nominee in droves, acting as if they were finding out for the first time that their primary voters have nominated a ridiculously unfit and unworthy candidate to be president of the United States.
What’s going to happen next? This is truly uncharted territory. Trump has announced that there is zero chance he’ll step aside from the ticket voluntarily, and whether the Republican National Committee is in any position to throw him off of it by force and put Mike Pence up in his place remains to be seen. And if there is a change at the top of the ticket, making it stick is going to require the cooperation of the states, which will mean legislatures throwing revisions of the laws together rapid-fire, and some battles being fought in courts, like if there’s a battleground state where a Democratic-majority legislature doesn’t want to cooperate.
In the coming days, updates should be flying fast and furious. Lawyers will be exploring possibilities, and the Republican Party will be running damage control, especially for the Senate races. Reminder: Though Hillary Clinton currently enjoys a comfortable lead over Trump–which was true even before these new revelations came out–the Democrats have only a slight edge when it comes to the probability of winning back a majority in the Senate. (There is no realistic chance of the Democrats taking back the House.)
While you’re on this page, please click onto some of the news headlines on the news feed at the right, to see what’s been happening. Ā And I’d love to hear your thoughts on any of it.
