



“I think it’s pretty stunning that after the debate, the speaker of the House has to come out and say that he will no longer defend Donald Trump and that each Republican member of Congress has to decide for themselves whether or not they’re going to support their party’s nominee,” Clinton’s communications director, Jen Palmieri, told reporters Monday. “I understand why they’re doing that, but Paul Ryan and other leaders in the Republican Party—there was a time where they could have spoken out. That time was this summer. And obviously it’s too late now. Somewhat of a civil war is breaking out in the Republican Party, but I think that Donald Trump didn’t become the nominee of his party on his own. These leaders helped legitimize him and I think they have a lot to answer for and the voters I imagine will hold them accountable.”

Last week, Palmieri was even more specific, telling reporters, “One thing that we would note is people like John McCain, Kelly Ayotte, Rob Portman, Congressman [Joe] Heck, we think they have a lot to answer for. These are leaders of the Republican Party that legitimized Donald Trump’s candidacy, that propped him up a number of times. Kelly Ayotte herself has said on 30 different occasions that she supports him, she said as recently as a week ago that he was a role model.”

The unambiguous message is that Clinton’s offer not to treat Trump as a totem of the Republican Party has expired. Obama underscored the shift in strategy this week when he upbraided these Republicans for sticking with Trump through disgrace after disgrace. “Why’d it take so long for some of them to finally walk away?” he asked. The Democratic super PAC Priorities USA has seemingly picked up these signals and will begin airing ads in Senate battlegrounds in the coming days.

Clinton’s conservative critics will surely object that her magnanimous-sounding offer was always a feint. But consider that until the Republican Party descended into total chaos, Republican candidates were doing a pretty good job decoupling themselves from Trump without much Democratic resistance. Incumbent GOP senators in every competitive state were running significantly ahead of him, aided in some measure by Clinton’s consistent message that Trump is an altogether different beast.

The GOP’s reaction to the Trump tape created the perfect occasion for phasing out this overly generous gesture, because it laid bare the devil’s bargain Republicans made this past summer.

Trump has shocked the national conscience at a sadistic clip, and every time, Republicans either shrugged it off or offered up some performative disquiet about it—until finally Trump was caught saying something so toxic to GOP politics that they finally reached a breaking point. Some of these officeholders defected from Trump altogether. Others, like North Carolina Senator Richard Burr, decided they’d wait to see how “grab ’em by the pussy” polls in their states. “I am going to watch his level of contrition over the next few days,” Burr said, “to determine my level of support.”

Florida Senator Marco Rubio—the Tea Party darling cum empathic party savior cum presidential candidate cum #NeverTrump Republican cum Trump supporter—issued a statement saying, “I disagree with [Trump] on many things, but I disagree with his opponent on virtually everything. I wish we had better choices for President. But I do not want Hillary Clinton to be our next President. And therefore my position has not changed.”

Over the course of Trump’s campaign, vanishingly few Republicans broke ranks with him as a matter of conscience. And in the past few days they’ve done so only in the interest of self-preservation.

“Republicans are not shocked; they’re scared,” wrote New York magazine’s Rebecca Traister. “Donald Trump is losing and they are beginning to understand that his loss is going to expose them, not simply to partisan defeat, but as a party that has been covert in its cohesion around the very biases that he makes coarse and plain…. Republicans are not separate from Trump, and he is not distinct from Republican nature or motivation; he is its slightly more unruly twin.”

Clinton’s critics in the Democratic Party will wonder whether she should have recognized this earlier—whether it’s too late now to leash Trump to these cynical Republicans in time to defeat them, and maximize Democratic Party gains on Capitol Hill. I’m skeptical that one strategic approach was clearly superior to the other. Clinton and Obama would’ve looked like geniuses if she’d managed to sustain her post-convention lead on the strength of Republican disunity and crossover support; instead she can claim to have made a meaningful gesture that Republicans rejected until it was too late. At some level, I suspect she knew it was an offer they wouldn’t accept—in part because victory still appeared to be in reach, and in part because Republicans really did beget Trumpism. Now that they realize the magnitude of their error, she’s decided to stop excusing them. Now that their voters are starting to peel away, I suspect that she’ll be quick to remind them who had Trump’s back.