CNN host Fareed Zakaria made a pretty damning point about Donald Trump s extremism on Monday night.Zakaria dedicated a few minutes to discuss the rise of Donald Trump in the Republican Party, pointing out that his extremist rise is no different than the rise of Islamic extremists in the Middle East. A main cause of the rise of extremism in the world of Islam has been the cowardice of Muslim moderates who, for decades, chose not to condemn bad ideas and ugly rhetoric,  Zakaria said, clearly referencing the fact that moderate Republicans here at home allowed conservative extremism, or Christian Sharia law, to fester within the party until it turned into a full blown infection that threatens to kill the party and ruin America. Fearing that they would be seen simply as ideological weaklings, they avoided confronting the cancer in plain sight. It is now clear that a similar dynamic has been at play in the world of conservatism,  he continued.Zakaria then praised Mitt Romeny for condemning Trump, but criticized him for taking too long to do so and for gratefully accepting Trump s endorsement in 2012 even though he was still the face of the birther movement. What is different about the conservative movement,  Zakaria says, is that  some of its mainstream members have embraced the rhetoric and tactics of the extremes. He then noted that it was Newt Gingrich who began this shift in the 1990s by circulating a memo calling for Republicans to smear Democrats with words such as  failure, pathetic, disgrace, and incompetent,  all of which have been used by Trump during this current election.Zaharia then destroyed the Republican notion that President Obama is at fault for Trump s rise within the GOP and offered a better explanation: Republicans have fed the country ideas, decline, betrayal, and treason. They have encouraged the forces of anti-intellectualism, obstructionism, and populism. They have flirted with bigotry and racism. Trump merely chose to unashamedly to embrace all of it, saying plainly what they were hinting at for years. In doing so, he hit the jackpot. The problem is not that Republican leaders should have begun to condemn Trump last year, it is that they should have condemned the ideas and tactics that led to his rise when they began to flourish in the last century. Here s the video via YouTube.In other words, moderate Republicans should apologize for waiting so long to call out the extremism within their own party and now it s just a question of whether this extremism can be defeated before it is too late.Featured image via video screen capture