New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof condemned Republican frontrunner Donald Trump and fertile ground set by the right-wing that has led to dominance thus far in the election.
“I can’t think of any national politician I’ve met over the decades who was so ill-informed on the issues, or so evasive, or who so elegantly and dangerously melded bombast and vapidity,” wrote Kristof.
Kristof went on to blame the relatively new rise of Trump on decades of Republican leaders, who “pried open a Pandora’s box, a toxic politics of fear and resentment, sometimes brewed with a tinge of racial animus, and they could never satisfy the unrealistic expectations that they nurtured among supporters.”
In addition to blaming leaders, Kristof also held accountable conservative media, which he claimed “hurt the Republican Party by tugging it to the right and sometimes breeding a myopic extremism in which reality is irrelevant.”
“Donald Trump is the consequence of irresponsible politicking by Republican leaders,” Kristof concluded, “the culmination of decades of cultivating unrealistic expectations within the politics of resentment.”
Read the full op-ed here.
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