Normally, when a major party’s presidential nominee visits Maine, we might state what we’d like to see the candidate address.
What does he have to say about the addiction epidemic Maine finds itself fighting? What does he propose to do to combat it?
If the candidate favors the Affordable Care Act’s full repeal, what does he propose in its place that actually ensures people can access health care and afford it?
How does the candidate defend a tax plan that supposedly adheres to conservative principles but would result in ballooning budget deficits?
But those are questions for a serious candidate. Donald Trump is no serious candidate for president, and he doesn’t deserve to be treated as one.
The Republican nominee returns to Maine on Thursday, but we can’t expect anything resembling a serious policy discussion during his time in Portland.
Trump has proven himself so vapid, so indecent, so dishonest, so superficial and so devoid of intellectual curiosity during his campaign for president that it defies purpose to call on Trump to iron out the details of an unbalanced tax plan or to get serious about addressing the addiction epidemic.
With Trump, there’s nothing serious about his run. There’s nothing decent or noble about his candidacy or what motivates it. We can’t fathom the thought of someone so narcissistic, so shallow and so immature in charge.
And as November approaches, Trump manages only to reach new lows.
The underhanded businessman has based his campaign on fear, blame, the construction of a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border and a ban on Muslim immigration into the U.S. As if that weren’t low enough, he has called Mexican immigrants rapists, attacked the military service of a senator who spent more than five years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, mocked a reporter’s disability and questioned the ability of a judge to rule fairly in a lawsuit filed by Trump University students because of his Mexican lineage.
On Saturday, he attacked the Muslim immigrant mother of a U.S. Army captain who was killed 12 years ago in combat in Iraq, saying “she had nothing to say” as she stood next to her husband last week at the Democratic National Convention during his stinging rebuke of the Republican standard-bearer.
Since Trump’s initial attack on Ghazala Khan, the Republican nominee has only doubled down on his criticism of her and her husband — not that we could expect someone with such poor judgment and such disregard for anyone but himself to reverse course suddenly and admit to a grievous wrong.
Throughout his business career and throughout his campaign for president, Trump time and again has shown he lacks the character to hold the office of president. He lacks character, period.
That’s why it’s so disappointing to see so many Republican office holders — especially the Republican members of Maine’s congressional delegation, Sen. Susan Collins and Rep. Bruce Poliquin — fail to disavow Trump fully. Neither Collins nor Poliquin has endorsed Trump, but neither has ruled out supporting him, either.
Collins has condemned Trump’s comments on Judge Gonzalo Curiel and his anti-Muslim rhetoric. On Sunday, she declared on Twitter, “No one should criticize grieving parents who have lost a son in combat. Capt. Khan was an American hero.” Notably — and unlike Republican Sens. John McCain of Arizona, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire — Collins didn’t even criticize Trump by name.
Trump is so devoid of compassion, decency and serious judgment that it’s disappointing for a senior Republican senator — a serious and dignified policymaker serving her fourth term — to criticize a Trump comment here, disagree with a policy proposal there, yet still hold out some hope that Trump will shape up and become a serious candidate.
“The central issue in this election isn’t Mr. Trump’s ideas, such as they are,” Wall Street Journal columnist Bret Stephens wrote Monday. “It’s his character, such as it is. The sin, in this case, is the sinner.”
As Trump visits Portland on Thursday, the appropriate welcome would be nothing less than complete disavowal and repudiation from the Republicans who represent Maine in Congress.
