… The party uproar over Trump’s charge that Judge Gonzalo Curiel is biased against him because he is “Mexican” dwarfs the unease over any previous Trump comment. …
Unease with demographic and cultural change has long rippled through the modern GOP agenda; it helps explain how the party has constructed a “coalition of restoration” revolving around blue-collar, older, religious and non-urban whites. But Trump’s overtly racial arguments against Curiel (barely softened by the candidate’s unapologetic explanatory statement on Tuesday) threaten to explicitly brand the GOP as a party of white racial backlash even as the electorate inexorably grows more diverse—and swells the Democrats’ competing “coalition of transformation.” That’s a formula not only for moral, but political, failure. CONT.
Ronald Brownstein, The Atlantic