How the Republican Party blew its best shot at defeating Hillary Clinton

As the Republican primary devolves, Hillary Clinton slips away

When the GOP fights, Hillary wins.
(Image credit: Andrew Renneisen/Getty Images)

Last week, the former presidential nominee of the Republican Party, Mitt Romney, gave a nationally televised speech denouncing the current Republican frontrunner Donald Trump. Trump responded by saying that Mitt Romney would have gotten down on his knees for Trump's endorsement four year earlier. By that same afternoon, many anti-Trump Republicans had sold themselves on an electoral strategy of splintering the Republican field and going for an all-out fight with Trump at the convention. And then, later that night in a televised debate, Donald Trump promised to be the kind of leader that inspires American servicemen to commit war crimes and rebutted a criticism by Marco Rubio by reassuring the crowd about the size of his penis.

Yes, the Republican debate is just so damn noisy, unsettling, and distracting that Republicans and most of the press have taken their eyes off Hillary Clinton. All the stories about her speeches at Goldman Sachs have dropped from view. So too the mentions of her deep infelicity with the media ("We were dead broke!"). And gone are the embarrassing stories about how Clinton charities act as a kind of global grifting and cronyism operation, enriching the Clintons and allowing corporate and foreign interests to buy their attention and ministrations.

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Michael Brendan Dougherty

Michael Brendan Dougherty is senior correspondent at TheWeek.com. He is the founder and editor of The Slurve, a newsletter about baseball. His work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, ESPN Magazine, Slate and The American Conservative.