Following the release of decade-old tapes of Donald Trump recorded on a hot mic making nauseating comments about sexual assault and how to treat women, prominent Republicans have been fleeing from his campaign like rats from a sinking ship. Endorsements are disappearing. Bigwigs like Paul Ryan and Reince Priebus are condemning the remarks. People are calling for him to step down.
Dear GOP establishment: It’s too late.
I’d like nothing more than for someone better than Trump to be running (that person isn’t Pence, by the way) but here we are. Trump won your nomination, outstripping his nearest competitor by almost three times his support. As of June, 85 percent of GOP voters were throwing their support behind him. His name is already on the certified list of candidates that’s going to appear on ballots on Nov. 8. The RNC has spent millions of dollars trying to get him elected. More than two weeks ago, thousands of people had already voted.
None of this even begins to mention the court battle you’d get yourself into trying to pull support from him now — using the two words “or otherwise” in the rules for replacing a candidate to eject Trump would be a reach at the best of times. But, as Yahoo pointed out in their rundown of the GOP’s options at this point, the famously litigious Trump could be counted on to sue if the nomination was taken away from him, which could quite possibly keep you in court through Election Day. And then there's the rules of the electoral college that would end in another court battle because of his name being on the ballots.
So, GOP establishment, you had your chance.
You had your chance not to spend the last sixty or seventy years dog-whistling to the racism, xenophobia and immigration panic that Trump rode to victory on. You had your chance to condemn his attitudes about women and minorities in an institutionalized way when he began his rise to power, because he’s always been like this, and none of us are really that shocked. You had your chance to not support him as your nominee — if you were really this horrified about the horrible things he’s been saying since the beginning of this race, you should have leaned on your morals earlier and not bitten the bullet for your party. You had hundreds of chances to not endorse. To not support. To not donate. To condemn.
You didn’t. And now, you’ve run out of time.
This is what the majority of the primary voter base you’ve cultivated wanted. Trump has been showing you since August 2015 exactly what he is — a racist, sexist, bully with no self-control — and you have done nothing significant to curtail it. None of us have any right to be surprised by this, and you of all people don’t have the right to complain.
You are in large part responsible for Trump because of decades of fear-mongering and appealing to the lowest common denominator in your voter base—not to mention a full election cycle of alternately ignoring and nurturing the snake in your garden.
Most people don’t like Trump. We wish that he’d never gotten this close to the highest office in this country, because it reflects badly on all of us. But he’s your nominee, and it’s not reasonable for that to change at this point. And even after he's gone — after a month or four years — he will always be in your past. It's too late for you or us to get rid of him.
Dear GOP establishment: You made this bed for all of us. It’s time to lie in it.