Monday will be huge for Donald Trump, the Republican Party, and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) that hosts him.
For all the bullying gibberish and impending violence that passes for Donald Trump’s political campaign, it’s most telling that “elite" Republicans didn’t hit the panic button until he threatened more than $100 million in expected AIPAC-linked Jewish donations.
Party brass had watched with growing unease as their lead candidate unleashed vile attacks on women, Muslims, Mexicans, and African Americans, and flirted with violence.
But they only stepped in to act when David Duke, a former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan notorious for his attacks on Jewish mega-donors, crawled out of his worm-hole to throw his support behind Trump.
Trump's waffling threw those contributions, expected at well over $100 million, into doubt. Will conservative Jews write cheques to a party where neo-Nazis turn up brandishing "KKK for Trump” signs? If they do, will David Duke succeed in making their support an issue?
The thing about stirring up cesspools is that it's no mystery what you’ll find. Modern sanitation grants polite society (also known as “the elites”) the sweet illusion that human excrement no longer exists. Yet everybody knows that the filth never disappeared, but lies rotting and putrefying in some subterranean labyrinth.
When Donald Trump equivocated over David Duke, the media sewers all backed up and overflowed at once.
Suddenly Duke’s virulent views got a platform on CNN, NBC, Esquire, RollingStone, and the New York Times, and just about everywhere else. His latest claim that Trump is helping to rehabilitate Hitler’s image is picking up huge traffic.
Anti-Semitism hasn’t had this kind of luck in America since Henry Ford.
Meanwhile, the Republican Party is in full-scale meltdown.
William Kristol, a key Jewish Republican fundraiser, is openly agitating for a third party candidate.
Sheldon Adelson, the most important Jewish donor in politics, is publicly open to Trump but has yet to commit his expected $100 million donation. Will support from billionaires Paul Singer, Seth Klarman and a host of others come in at expected levels, will their enthusiasm wane, or will Kristol and others peel their dollars away from the party?
As the New Yorker’s 2014 AIPAC profile notes, the immensely powerful lobby group influences a network of pro-Israel SuperPAC donations that are critical to Congressional races. Ostensibly bi-partisan and neutral, AIPAC veered sharply right to support Benjamin Netanyahu over Barack Obama, and openly played partisan politics over the Iran nuclear weapons negotiations.
If Trump's campaign continues to spin out of control and AIPAC-linked Jewish financial support disappears, Republican control of the Senate and House of Representatives could be thrown into doubt.
Trump’s ascendance and the stunning rise of racist rhetoric has forced the GOP onto a knife’s edge with nowhere to go.
Monday's AIPAC speech is the most important moment of the campaign for the Republican Party, and it's all about the money. Try as Trump might to brush David Duke's raw sewage off his suit, it’s going to stick.
The big question is whether he can still sell it.
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