Republican fears of a triple calamity in November — the loss of the White House, the Senate, and the Supreme Court — are growing after a fractious and at times crude debate in which Donald Trump bragged, among other things, about the size of his manhood.
On stage at the Fox Theatre in Detroit, the billionaire was mocked by his rivals for his thin grasp of policy, his allegedly fraudulent business practices, and his shifting campaign promises. Hours earlier he had been denounced as unfit for office and a danger to democracy by the Republican party’s two previous presidential nominees, Mitt Romney and John McCain.
Yesterday, much of America was still agog at Mr Trump’s denials that his “small hands” correlated with another part of his anatomy. He told the television audience of more than 15 million people that Marco Rubio, the Florida senator, had implied in a recent speech that because his hands were small, “something else must be small”. He then held up his hands and waggled his fingers. “I guarantee you there’s no problem,” he said.
The taunts were part of an ugly evening that underscored doubts over whether Mr Trump can fulfil his promise to unite a splintered and disorientated party before November’s general election. He leads a divided field, but has fewer than half the delegates awarded so far.
The boisterous Detroit audience smirked, but the schoolyard tone will have dismayed Republican senators up for re-election in November who are bracing themselves for what has been dubbed a “Trumpmare” scenario in which the party loses three branches of government.
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Mr Trump has promised that his unorthodox voter coalition will enlarge the Republican base, but many are convinced that he would be trounced by Hillary Clinton if they were to face off in November; a fear reinforced by a CNN poll that showed him trailing the likely Democratic candidate by 52 per cent to 44 per cent.
Mrs Clinton would then be able to appoint a justice to fill the Supreme Court vacancy left by the death last month of Antonin Scalia, a staunch conservative. That would tilt the nine-member court, which previously had five conservative justices, to the left — shaping issues such as abortion and gun control for decades to come.
Analysts believe that a Trump candidacy would also increase the risk of the Republicans losing vulnerable Senate seats in Illinois, Wisconsin, Florida, Nevada, New Hampshire and Pennsylvania — which would be enough to overturn their 54-seat majority in the upper legislature.
Mr Trump’s success on Super Tuesday, winning seven out of eleven states, underscored the conundrum he poses to a Republican elite torn between disgust at his rabble-rousing antics and growing appreciation of his political skills.
On Thursday Mr McCain and Mr Romney made an extraordinary intervention. Mr Romney called for voters to cast their ballots strategically in the upcoming primaries, to deny Mr Trump the nomination, and dismissed him as “a phoney, a fraud” who is “playing the American people for suckers”. Mr McCain said that Mr Trump’s foreign policy ideas — which have included torturing terrorist suspects, “taking out” their families and stealing Iraq’s oil — would put the US in danger.
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In the debate, Mr Rubio pleaded with voters not “to turn over the conservative movement to someone who thinks the nuclear triad [the country’s atomic arsenal] is a rock band from the 1980s”.
John Kasich, the Ohio governor, who is yet to win a state, tried to rise above the fray. He said that polls gave him the biggest margin of victory over Mrs Clinton, and earned cheers when he added: “People say everywhere I go: ‘You seem to be the adult on the stage’.”
Ted Cruz attacked the tycoon for donating money to Mrs Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign. At one point he addressed an animated Mr Trump as if he were a toddler. “Learn not to interrupt,” Mr Cruz said. “It is not hard. Count to ten, Donald.”
Mr Trump hit back with personal insults, calling the Texas senator “Lying Ted”, and goading “Little Marco”.
At one point the Fox News moderators — among them Megyn Kelly, who clashed with Mr Trump in Cleveland last year — joined the assault on the billionaire, screening slides that showed how the US spends less on pharmaceuticals than Mr Trump has promised to save with his negotiation skills.
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Infuriatingly for his rivals, however, Mr Trump again appeared to sail unscathed through the broadsides. He has weathered months of attacks on his patchy conservative credentials, his use of racially charged rhetoric, his chequered business record, and his hazy, shifting policies — gathering momentum all the while. The three other candidates have all promised to support him if he is the eventual winner.
Their best option now appears to be to try to deny him the 1,237 delegates that he needs to clinch the nomination. That would set the stage for a contested party convention in July, where a presidential candidate would be chosen after a chaotic, unpredictable and potentially ugly spate of horse trading and backroom dealing.
That course would carry huge risks. Mr Trump has repeatedly said that he might run as an independent if he felt he had been treated unfairly — which many believe would ease Mrs Clinton’s path to the Oval Office.
The retired brain surgeon Ben Carson, who said this week that he could not see “a political path forward”, formally announced yesterday that he was suspending his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination. He did not attend the party’s debate in Detroit.
Behind the story: Low jokes amid high politics
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Donald Trump’s comments about his anatomy marked a nadir in what was already an election campaign remarkable for low-brow rhetoric, but profanity has always been part of US politics (Rhys Blakely writes).
The phrase “expletive deleted” became popular after the release of Nixon’s Watergate tapes, so often were swearwords redacted.
When Nixon urged an aide to cover-up the White House’s part in the Watergate break-in, he said: “I don’t give a s*** what happens, I want you all to stonewall it.”
Newspapers faced a dilemma: the language was far saltier than expected from the commander-in-chief. One editor formulated a compromise: “We’ll only take s*** from the president.”
In 2004 Dick Cheney, then vice-president, told a senator — on the floor of the Senate — “Go f*** yourself” after being questioned about contracts in Iraq awarded to a company that Mr Cheney once led.
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On the same day the Senate passed the Defence of Decency Act.
Legend has it that Abraham Lincoln used to tell a joke abut an American who went to stay with a British host. Hoping to needle him, the host hung a portrait of Washington in the privy and asked his guest if it was placed appropriately.
Certainly, said the American, “the world knows nothing will make an Englishman s*** quicker than the sight of George Washington”.
