Why it might be too late to stop the Trump train in South Carolina

Throughout his 22 years in the trenches of South Carolina politics, U.S. Rep. Mark Sanford has seen more than enough to justify the state’s distinctively colorful reputation.

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For starters, there was the time in 2009 when, as governor, Sanford forever redefined the meaning of “hiking the Appalachian Trail.” And before that came the particularly heated presidential primary campaigns of 2000 and 2008 when a racially charged environment on both the Republican and Democratic sides further cemented South Carolina’s status as a breeding ground for campaign trail nastiness.

Sanford, however, said he has never seen anything that quite matches the overtly rancorous tenor that Donald Trump and several other leading Republican candidates brought to Saturday night’s debate in Greenville, which Sanford said was “so far outside the norm” of anything that typically takes place in public view.

But this is not a typical election. It is, instead, one in which the GOP front-runner has most recently paid no apparent political price for denigrating America’s most prominent Republican family and singling out George W. Bush in particular for failing to prevent the 9/11 attacks — a previously unthinkable challenge for a serious White House aspirant from either party.

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