The other surprising risk that Donald Trump poses to American democracy

It's only August. Election day is still more than three months away. But increasingly, it's hard to find something new and freshly insightful to say about Donald Trump. After all, it was LAST summer that I described the short-fingered vulgarian as the climax of our long-term slide into crude entertainment values trumping political debate. And we were all wearing sweaters back in February when I wrote my pieces warning Americans that we needed to wake up to the possibility of this neo-fascist capturing the White House, and spoke of the need for a Trump Resistance to keep his noxious blend of know-nothingism and assorted prejudices out of the Oval Office.

Those weren't original ideas; many others were saying the same things at the same times. But only now has the American body politic fully caught up with the notion that the GOP nominated a candidate who isn't just a bad choice but, in the words of President Obama, "unfit" to be commander-in-chief. Just this afternoon, 50 -- count 'em,  50! -- GOP "national security experts" (if you're thinking George Carlin and "jumbo shrimp" or "military intelligence," join the club) -- released a statement that Trump is too dangerous to serve as POTUS. A trickle of Republican activists crossing over to endorse Hillary Clinton is threatening to become a flood.

This is exactly the Trump Resistance that I wrote about earlier this year. And it's certainly a relief that with each passing day it seems less likely that a gold-encrusted "Trump" nameplate will be installed across the facade of the White House in January. And yet, now that the Trump Resistance is actually here, there's one little -- or not so little -- thing that's bothering me.

The growing consensus that Trump isn't fit to run the country means that too many people have decided it's too dangerous to even criticize -- or even ask tough questions of -- his opponent Clinton. If you're a Democratic Party operative, you're probably delighted by this. As a journalist, I find it alarming, even scary -- this idea that a candidate should become the 45th president without the tough questioning this demands.

Let's start with this: Clinton went 260 days without holding a press conference before multiple journalists, a streak that lasted all of this calendar year until this weekend when -- with little advance fanfare -- she took questions at a meeting of black and Latino journalists. Last week, when the streak was still intact, I was on Twitter and seconded a friend's opinion that it was appalling that the Democratic nominee was refusing to meet the press. Several Democratic voters pounced on me.

"After she [is] President she should (and will) hold press conference[s]," one Clinton supporter wrote to me. "But beating the dead horses of Benghazi and emails before the election, when Trump represents a severe threat to our democracy is simply aiding Trump."

Look, I agree that after the endless investigations and her 11-hour hearing, there's not much left for Clinton to say about Benghazi. But that's hardly the point. If you can't stand up there and answer unscreened questions -- not just that things that reporters want to know but the things that citizens want to know -- your fitness to serve as president is in serious question. But then, I guess raising this issue, or demanding that our likely next president answer a few questions, risks giving Trump the keys to the nuclear suitcase. So excuse me for bringing it up.

I don't blog the Trump outrage du jour -- the disrespect that he showed the Khan family, his probably-joking plea for Russia to hack Hillary's emails, his forced endorsement of Paul Ryan, and so on, and so on. It's just too much. Some people have even publicly questioned Trump's mental health. I think he's probably sane, just an unbalanced narcissist.

So Hillary's response to this and to America's rejection of Trump has been to spend much of her recent time wooing the endorsements of a) billionaires and b) the Republican "national security experts" leading up to today's letter from the 50 who won't be supporting Trump. This makes a lot of sense -- millions of voters this year went to the polls still angry over the aftermath of the 2008 economic crash and the war in Iraq. So why not woo all of the folks responsible for those debacles, instead of addressing the electorate's concern over reckless militarism and income inequality?

I'm being sarcastic. But Trump's implosion has given Clinton carte blanche to run the kind of campaign she wanted to run all along -- dodging hard questions and coalescing her support among the wealthy and powerful elites who've caused everyday Americans to so greatly distrust our most powerful institutions in the first place. Just this afternoon, one of my favorite writers, Esquire's Charlie Pierce, noted that Clinton now seems to be chasing the endorsement of Vietnam era war criminal Henry Kissinger, which would cause him not to vote for her. But any vote not for Hillary -- for Jill Stein (who has a world of, um,  issues) or this new CIA-Goldman Sachs candidate (nothing suspicious there) -- might put Trump's finger on the button.

Yes, blame Hillary and blame the Democratic elites who threw everything they had behind such a flawed candidate. But the lion's share of the responsibility for this mess belongs to Trump and all the voters and enablers who put a dangerous man this close to actual power. They have robbed America of the fundamental thing that makes a democracy: A real open and contested election.