GOP in meltdown state as Trump campaign goes down the tubes

WASHINGTON: The Grand Old Party, as the Republican Party is commonly referred to, is coming apart at the seams. Bolting from the toxic rhetoric and tawdry reputation of Donald Trump that has invited the epithet Grabbers of P-ssy on the party, its most powerful official, House Speaker Paul Ryan , has virtually called for a "conscience vote," in the Presidential election. The missive cuts Republican lawmakers and the rank and file loose to make their own call in November, his only objective being to retain the GOP majority in the House and Senate.
In effect, that makes Trump an independent candidate, although it is too late for the party to formally withdraw him as its nominee (ballots for the Presidential election have already been printed and early voting has already begun in many states a month ahead of the November 8 Election Day).
Besides, there are hardline Republican lawmakers who back Trump because of constituent-pressure: they are in white, blue-collar majority districts.
The GOP is now effectively fractured and in a meltdown, with Trump's status akin to that of a Samsung Galaxy7, ditched by all but the most loyal of the so-called "deplorables." Trump, and just about everyone, is on his own.
The fallout is starting to show up in opinion polls . Some of them are now showing Clinton racing to double-digit lead, overcoming data dumps that don't cast her in particularly flattering light, confirming Right Wing tropes that she is a conventional conniving politician.
RealClearPolitics’ poll of polls, which showed her ahead by 5 points on Monday morning, has her up by 6.5 points 24 hours later.
Unless there is a drastic and unprecedented reversal, the GOP's meltdown is handing over the White House to her on a platter. No candidate in history has overcome more than a four point deficit in October to win the election in November, that too with the nominating party disowning him.
You wouldn't guess that though watching Trump rallies following the second debate as he continued his scorched earth policy of torching conventional politics, which his hardcore supporters feel in the only way to "Make America Great Again."
On Monday, he revelled in chants of "Lock her up! Lock her up!" at a rally in Pennsylvania, renewing his pledge to appoint a special prosecutor to nail Clinton should he be elected President, although his aides desperately tried to suggest that his threat during the debate to send her to jail was just a quip. As usual, they had failed to rein in arguably the most unconventional – to put it mildly – candidate in history.
Likewise the Republican Party leadership, which continued to pussyfoot around Trump's tawdriness despite informally withdrawing support to his White House candidacy. It required a withering putdown by a late-night comedian to drive home the point.
Trump "alone does not bear the burden of his conduct, because he alone did not make himself your party's nominee," said John Oliver, the British satirist, to the grandstanding GOP grandees. "All of you have consistently supported him through some absolutely heinous shit."
It is now starting to look like Trump's gambit of invoking Bill Clinton's alleged philandering to cover up his own lewd persona maybe backfiring. Questions are being asked about how Trump got the women together, and whether they were paid for their appearance and who paid them.
Moreover it turns out that Trump had once derided them and described Bill Clinton as a victim, while castigating Republicans for making a big deal of the Monica Lewinsky scandal.
"I don't necessarily agree with his victims, his victims are terrible," Trump told Fox News in a 1998 interview. "He is really a victim himself. But he put himself in that position."
"The whole group, Paula Jones, Lewinsky, it's just a really unattractive group," he added. "I'm not just talking about physical."