WaPo Editorial: Republicans keep trying to normalize Trump. He keeps proving it’s impossible.
By Editorial Board July 18 at 1:56 PM
DAMAGING AS Donald Trump’s style is to American political culture, that’s not where the focus should be after this astonishing weekend. True, the campaign fumbled the rollout of Mr. Trump’s vice-presidential pick and failed even more miserably in its efforts at style adjustment. But those missteps should not distract from the more basic failure of substance. The candidate does not deal honestly with issues — neither in the sense of basic logic and fact nor in the sense of offering voters something more than slogans upon which to evaluate his potential presidency.
As Republicans assembled in Cleveland, the Trump campaign was trying to normalize the candidate. The choice of the relatively conventional governor of Indiana, Mike Pence, as running mate, was part of the effort, as was the sheaf of boilerplate that Mr. Trump sporadically consulted during his introduction of Mr. Pence on Saturday. But in repeated flights of rhetoric, both Saturday and in a joint interview with Mr. Pence on Sunday’s edition of “60 Minutes,” Mr. Trump showed that belligerent self-absorption is not, for him, just an act; it’s characterological. You might say this bull carries the china shop around with him.
That is less alarming than Mr. Trump’s continuing inclination to fiction. He wildly accused his likely opponent, Democrat Hillary Clinton, of having “created” or “invented” the Islamic State terrorist group. He blamed her for having “led” President Obama into all of his policy mistakes, when in fact it is well-documented that she pushed for a different, more muscular approach to Syria’s civil war. He insisted that the Obama approach to the Islamic State is “weak,” and that his would be far stronger, then, in response to prodding from CBS’s Lesley Stahl, outlined an approach — selective use of U.S. ground troops, reliance on regional allies — hardly distinguishable from current policy. To be sure, a Trump administration would “declare war” on the Islamic State, presumably with a vote of Congress; that, indeed, might fill the legal lacuna in which the United States now operates. We wonder, though, whether Mr. Trump understands that a declaration of war reaffirms the applicability of the laws of war, which would preclude his plan for “worse than” waterboarding.
Then there is the chasm between Mr. Trump and Mr. Pence on issues so fundamental — including trade, immigration and Mr. Trump’s proposed temporary ban on admitting Muslims to the United States — that their reconciliation cried out for candid explanation. Instead, what we got was Mr. Trump’s conspiratorial claim, in his Saturday speech, that Mr. Pence had been under “pressure” from the “establishment” into endorsing Mr. Trump’s opponent, the erstwhile “Lyin’ Ted” Cruz (now, by the way, a “good guy,” according to Mr. Trump) in the Indiana primary. And Mr. Trump offered the blithe assurance that Mr. Pence’s 2002 vote for the war in Iraq was okay, whereas Ms. Clinton’s disqualifies her.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/republicans-keep-trying-to-normalize-trump-he-keeps-proving-its-impossible/2016/07/18/7e6cad68-4ced-11e6-aa14-e0c1087f7583_story.html
