There is no deal breaker
by digby
I'm not sure I ever understood why Trump's latest atrocity was seen to be the deal breaker --- after all, he has been calling mexicans rapists and saying he was going to deport 12 million people including their American children for months. It's not like this isn't entirely in keeping with his other comments.
In any case, it isn't a deal breaker with the voters:
Almost two-thirds of likely 2016 Republican primary voters favor Donald Trump's call to temporarily ban Muslims from entering the U.S., while more than a third say it makes them more likely to vote for him.
Those are some of the findings from a Bloomberg Politics/Purple Strategies PulsePoll, an online survey conducted Tuesday, that shows support at 37 percent among all likely general-election voters for the controversial proposal put forward by the Republican front-runner.
“We believe these numbers are made up of some people who are truly expressing religious bigotry and others who are fearful about terrorism and are willing to do anything they think might make us safer,” Doug Usher, who runs polling for Washington-based Purple Strategies, said in his analysis of the findings. "This indicates that, despite some conventional wisdom expressed in the last 48 hours, this is unlikely to hurt Trump at least in the primary campaign."
Apparently, the only Republicans who oppose this must be office holders and media figures because that's a very small number in opposition.
The "fearful about terrorism" is just crazy. We had an attack in which people hijacked passenger planes and flew them into buildings killing thousands of people 15 years ago. Nobody proposed anything like this. And, by the way, we haven't had an attack even close to that scale since then.
Being fearful of lunatics with guns randomly shooting people completely rational. These things happen with terrifying frequency in our country. What isn't rational is that these Trump people are only afraid of this when a Muslim is on the other side of the semi-automatic weapon. otherwise it's just the price of freedom.
This is nuts. But then these Republican voters have been working themselves into a frenzy for quite some time. They're more than ready for a man on a white horse.
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The GOP establishment is in a tough position. They know that Trump could take his ball and run as an independent and siphon off enough votes to ensure they will lose. (Unlike Perot, Trump draws from them exclusively.) But they are also facing the prospect of Trump doing so much damage to their party that they can't win anyway, even if he doesn't get the nomination. (And who know? He might just get it.)
