Timothy Egan, who wrote liberal screeds for the New York Times as a reporter before finding a more fitting habitat as one of the paper's stable of left-wing anti-Republican columnists, piled on the GOP's current presidential front-runner in "Trump Is the Poison His Party Concocted," in the paper's Sunday Review.

It's a back-handed defense of the controversial real estate mogul, suggesting that Trump is only the inevitable end result of toxic GOP racism and attacks on war heroes like....John Kerry?

Egan strung together some out-of-context political events from over the last dozen years while leaving out the parts that would spoil his anti-Republican narrative. He trusted his readership either would not remember the details, or (if they're loyal Times readers) had never read about them in the first place.

The adults patrolling the playpen of Republican politics are appalled that we’ve become a society where it’s O.K. to make fun of veterans, to call anyone who isn’t rich a loser, to cast an entire group of newly arrived strivers as rapists and shiftless criminals.

....

They say he’s trashing the Republic brand. They say he’s “stirring up the crazies,” in the words of Senator John McCain. But Trump is the brand, to a sizable degree. And the crazies have long flourished in the Republican media wing, where any amount of gaseous buffoonery goes unchallenged.

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Trump is a byproduct of all the toxic elements Republicans have thrown into their brew over the last decade or so -- from birtherism to race-based hatred of immigrants, from nihilists who shut down government to elected officials who shout “You lie!” at their commander in chief.