re: #66 goddamnedfrank

Because all of his primary opponents knew the GOP base was abjectly racist they cravenly avoided every effective avenue of attack they could have used against him. They pointedly did not call him out on his racism, bring up the 1973 DOJ Fair Housing Act lawsuit, attack his birther nonsense, etc. The same thing goes with regards to the endemic misogyny in the party, when he mentioned Megyn Kelly’s menstruation and derided Fiorina’s face as too ugly to vote for nobody really took him to task, they just clucked a little bit and tried to cast themselves as being more adult.

This craven refusal on the part of the other candidates to attack Donald in starkest and most accurate terms came from their own insight into what the Republican Party base truly is, a dysfunctional claque combining rabid white nationalists, repressed hypocrites wrapped in a cloak of Christian identity, and economic sociopaths.

The other half to that is that Trump benefits from the self-delusion that is a trademark of the GOP base, the ability to convince themselves that they’re not racists/misogynists/bigots/etc despite all the evidence to the contrary. So to attack Trump as a racist means to imply that his supporters are racists by association and that does little but piss them off. Especially when the party’s views and policies are not just nicer ways of expressing the same ideas that Trump is saying aloud.