Source: Rolling Stone
Win, lose or drop out, the Republican nominee has laid waste to the American political system. On the trail for the last gasp of the ugliest campaign in our nation’s history
Saturday, early October, at a fairground 40 minutes southwest of Milwaukee. The very name of this place, Elkhorn, conjures images of past massacres on now-silent fields across our blood-soaked history. Nobody will die here; this is not Wounded Knee, but it is the end of an era. The modern Republican Party will perish on this stretch of grass.
Trump had been scheduled to come here today, to kiss defenseless babies and pose next to pumpkins and haystacks at Wisconsin congressman and House Speaker Paul Ryan’s annual “GOP Fall Fest.”
Instead, the two men declared war on each other. The last straw was the release of a tape capturing Donald Trump uttering five words – “Grab them by the pussy” – during an off-camera discussion with former Access Hollywood host Billy Bush about what you can do to women when you’re a star.
Keeping up with Trump revelations is exhausting. By late October, he’ll be caught whacking it outside a nunnery. There are not many places left for this thing to go that don’t involve kids or cannibalism. We wait, miserably, for the dong shot.
Ryan, recoiling from Trump’s remarks, issued a denunciation (“Women are to be championed and revered, not objectified”), disinviting Trump from his Elkhorn celebration, which was to be the first joint campaign appearance by the country’s two highest-ranking Republicans.
As a result, the hundreds of Republican faithful who came spoiling for Trumpian invective, dressed in T-shirts reading things like DEPLORABLE LIVES MATTER and BOMB THE SHIT OUT OF ISIS, and even FUCK OFF, WE’RE FULL (a message for immigrants), ended up herded out here, as if by ruse, to get a big dose of the very thing they’d rebelled against.
They sat through a succession of freedom-and-God speeches by Wisconsin Republicans like Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, Sen. Ron Johnson, Gov. Scott Walker and Ryan, who collectively represented the party establishment closing ranks and joining the rest of the country in denouncing the free-falling Trump. Once an unstoppable phenomenon who had the media eating out of his controversial-size hands, Trump, in the space of a few hours, had become the mother of all pop-culture villains, a globally despised cross of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Charlie Sheen and Satan.
To the self-proclaimed “Deplorables” who came out to see Trump anyway, Ryan’s decision was treason, the latest evidence that no matter what their party affiliation, Washington politicians have more in common with one another than with regular people.