GOP Donald Trump said today on a conservative radio show that “he believes Republicans should shut down the government rather than fund Planned Parenthood,” CBS News reports.
Trump apparently is trying to establish his radical rightwing chops ahead of Fox News’ pre-primary Republican debate this Thursday by playing to the party’s grassroots ignoramuses, a tactic he employed in the past when he became the so-called “birther” movement’s most prominent mouthpiece.
Planned Parenthood is a nonprofit organization that provides a wide array of health services to women. It’s demonized by conservatives because it operates abortion clinics, although abortions amount to less than 2% of its health services. Federal law prohibits using taxpayer money to pay for abortions, but Planned Parenthood gets some federal reimbursement for its other services, and this funding is now under attack by Republicans in Congress.
Trump entered the GOP nomination sweepstakes as the darkest of horses, and immediately shot to the top of the polls, which transformed him overnight from gadfly to serious candidate. The Trump Phenomenon is explainable as a product of public frustration with fork-tongued politicians and hunger for a plain-speaking candidate who “tells it like it is,” never mind whether he knows what he’s talking about.
Of course, Republicans don’t need an excuse to shut down the government. They hate government and everyone who works for it. The only restraint on their willingness to shut it down and lay off public workers is the potential for blowback at the ballot box. The last time they pulled this stunt, they got slapped in the next election. It wasn’t good for the stock market, either, and some of them own stocks. But government-hating is now a key tenet of GOP ideology and talk of this kind of hostage-taking stirs their primal juices.
Of course, hostage-taking is exactly what it is — “if I don’t get my way, I’m taking my football and going home!” There was a vote in the Senate on defunding Planned Parenthood, which didn’t succeed, and what Republicans couldn’t get through our established democratic processes, Trump now proposes to obtain by using the methods of terrorists, hijackers, and pirates.
Is that someone who should be our next president?
Photo: Donald Trump, hostage taker