Poor John McCain: from prisoner of war to prisoner of Trump | Tim Dowling
It occurred to me only recently that it's never going to happen. Even if Donald Trump loses the race in November, he'll act as if he's won. He'll repeatedly explain how, by many different measures, he was the true victor. He'll blame others for whatever went wrong and insist that the outcome suits him perfectly anyway, because he's a billionaire and therefore immune to dissatisfaction or regret. The bit where he loses and feels bad about himself, that's never coming. And, of course, he might actually win.
Instead it's the Republican party that's going to lose and feel bad about itself, whether Trump is victorious or not. It's not yet clear precisely how this disaster will pan out, but here's a telling example of what's already happening. John McCain is a widely respected Republican senator. He may have lost the 2008 presidential election to Obama, but he held his Arizona senate seat two years later with 59% of the vote. He's also a former prisoner of war, and when Trump implied that McCain didn't qualify as a war hero because he'd been captured (this was back in July last year) it seemed like one of those sufficiently stupid moments. It wasn't.
Continue reading...