Who would you vote if the 2016 election is Trump vs. Sanders

[Valmy]

I do not really trust the actors to do that. If they did everybody wouldn't own consumer crap and instead bank all their money...and then the economy would collapse.

Why would banking all of their money and starving to death be in someone's best interests?

For that matter, why is consumption "crap?"

I was making a joke about our consumer credit card culture. I think budgeting and saving money is good, not sure why that would make somebody starve to death.

[garbon]

I have to shop till I drop to feed my soul.

[mongers]

I have to shop till I drop to feed my soul.

But doesn't that wear your souls out?

[The Brain]

I only experienced the rush from shopping once. It was when I was getting back into miniatures painting as an adult and went from store to store and bought everything I needed.

[jimmy olsen]

A brokered convention in modern times? That would be awesome!

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/stop-comparing-donald-trump-and-bernie-sanders/

2016 Election   11:11 AM Sep 9, 2015

Stop Comparing Donald Trump And Bernie Sanders

By Nate Silver


A lot of people are linking the candidacies of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump under headings like "populist" and "anti-establishment." Most of these comparisons are too cute for their own good — not only because it's too early to come to many conclusions about the campaign, but also because Trump and Sanders are fundamentally different breeds of candidates who are situated very differently in their respective nomination races.

You can call both "outsiders." But if you're a Democrat, Sanders is your eccentric uncle: He has his own quirks, but he's part of the family. If you're a Republican, Trump is as familial as the vacuum salesman knocking on your door.

Consider the following. We'll start with some of the more superficial differences between Sanders and Trump and work our way to the more important ones.

1. Trump is "winning" (for now), and Sanders isn't. There are lots of reasons to suspect that Trump will fall from his position atop the GOP polls sooner or later, but he'd be a favorite to win a hypothetical national primary held today. Sanders, by contrast, trails Hillary Clinton by about 20 percentage points in national polls that include Joe Biden, and by 30 points in polls that don't.

2. Sanders is campaigning on substantive policy positions, and Trump is largely campaigning on the force of his personality. I'm not sure this assertion requires a lot of proof, but if you need some, check out the candidates' websites. Sanders's lists dozens of specific policy proposals across a wide range of issues; Trump's details his position on just one, immigration.

Screen Shot 2015-09-08 at 8.55.00 PM

3. Sanders is a career politician; Trump isn't. Let's not neglect this obvious one. Bernie Sanders has been in Congress since 1991, making him one of the most senior members of Congress; Trump has never officially run a political campaign before.

4. Trump is getting considerably more media attention. Trump is a perpetual attention machine who gets a disproportionate amount of media coverage — as much as the rest of the GOP field combined. Sanders hasn't been ignored by the press, which wants a horse race between Sanders (or Biden, or anyone!!!) and Clinton. Still, Sanders's media coverage has been paltry compared with Trump's. According to Yahoo News, Trump has received about 35,000 media "hits" in the past month, compared with about 9,000 for Sanders. For comparison, Clinton has had 18,000 hits over the same period, and Jeb Bush has had 14,000.

5. Sanders has a much better "ground game." Trump, in addition to his ubiquity on television, has some semblance of a campaign operation. But Sanders's organization is much larger and more experienced.

6. Sanders holds policy positions of a typical liberal Democrat; Trump's are all over the place. While Sanders doesn't officially call himself a Democrat — a fact that might annoy Democratic elites — he takes policy positions that are consistent with those of Democrats in Congress. In the previous Congress (113th), Sanders voted the same as liberal Democratic senators Barbara Boxer, Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand and Sherrod Brown 95 percent of the time or more.(1) He voted with party leader Harry Reid 91 percent of the time and the expressed position of President Obama(2) 93 percent of the time. He also voted with Clinton 93 percent of the time when the two were in the Senate together.

Here are the senators Sanders voted with most and least often in the 113th Congress, according to Voteview.org:

SENATOR  MOST OFTEN  SENATOR LEAST OFTEN


Boxer (CA) 96.2% Manchin (WV) 82.1%
Markey (MA) 95.9 Baucus (MT) 87.4
Booker (NJ) 95.8 Pryor (AR) 87.6
Cantwell (WA) 95.8 Donnelly (IN) 89.9
Leahy (VT) 95.7 Hagan (NC) 90.0
Gillibrand (NY) 95.7 Heitkamp (ND) 90.2
Brown (OH) 95.7 Lautenberg (NJ) 90.6
Hirono (HI) 95.4 Tester (MT) 90.6
Menendez (NJ) 95.4 Landrieu (LA) 90.6
Stabenow (MI) 95.4 Reid (NV) 91.4

Trump's positions are harder to pin down — and he doesn't have a voting record to evaluate — but he has far more profound potential differences with the Republican orthodoxy on major issues ranging from taxation to health care to reproductive rights.

7. Sanders's support divides fairly clearly along ideological and demographic lines; Trump's doesn't. So far, Sanders has won a lot of support from white liberals — which helps him in Iowa and New Hampshire — but not so much from white moderates or non-white Democrats. Each of these groups represents about a third of the Democratic primary electorate nationally, so this makes Sanders's path to the Democratic nomination fairly easily to analyze; he'll be viable only to the extent that he gains support among the other two groups.

Trump's support, by contrast, is fairly evenly spread across a range of demographic and ideological groups that appear in Republican polls. He doesn't do especially well (or especially poorly) with "tea party" voters, for instance. There are a variety of ways to interpret this — perhaps, even, the "Trumpen proletariat" is a group all its own.

8. Sanders's candidacy has clear historical precedents; they're less obvious for Trump. Even the most formidable-seeming front-runners haven't won their nominations without some semblance of a fight. Clinton's position relative to Sanders is analogous to the one Al Gore held against Bill Bradley in the 2000 Democratic primary. Sanders's campaign also has parallels to liberal stalwarts from Howard Dean to Eugene McCarthy; these candidates can have an impact on the race, but they usually don't win the nomination.

Trump has some commonalities also: to "bandwagon" candidates like Newt Gingrich and Herman Cain; to media-savvy, factional candidates like Pat Buchanan; and to self-funded candidates like Steve Forbes. None of those candidates, however, was as openly hostile to their party as Trump is with Republicans.

9. Trump is running against a field of 16 candidates; Sanders is running against one overwhelming front-runner. Trump is also in new territory in another respect. There's never been a Republican nomination race — or for that matter a Democratic one — with so many declared candidates. Most of the Republicans are not tokenish candidates either. All but Trump, Ben Carson and Carly Fiorina have served as senators or governors before, many of them in highly populous states.

This unprecedented volume of candidates helps Trump in various ways. For instance, it increases the value of differentiating yourself from the field. Unorthodox or even unpopular policy positions may help you win a faction of the Republican electorate, even if it makes you less popular within your party overall. That faction may be enough to carry the plurality in polls, leading to favorable media coverage and then creating a virtuous cycle that attracts some bandwagon voters.

Meanwhile, the abundance of candidates seems to have resulted in the Republican establishment holding off on throwing its support to any one candidate, either through endorsements or in the money race.

The Democratic establishment, by contrast, has never been so united behind any non-incumbent candidate as they are with Clinton.

10. Trump is a much greater threat to his party establishment. It would be a mistake, however, to conclude that Sanders is as threatening to the Democratic establishment as Trump is to the Republican one. Sanders's policy positions, as I've mentioned, are about 95 percent the same as those of a typical liberal Democrat in Congress. And where they diverge, they push Democrats further to the left in a fairly predictable way,(3) acting as a "supersized" or slightly exaggerated version of the Democratic agenda. Indeed, while Sanders lacks support from elected Democratic officials, he has some backing from other influential constituencies within the party, such as some labor unions and liberal media outlets.

Why, then, have so few Democrats officially endorsed Sanders? First, because Clinton is extremely popular with both elite and rank-and-file Democrats. Her relative lack of competition is a sign of strength, not weakness — she won the "invisible primary" stage of the campaign. Second, because Democrats are right to be concerned about the general election prospects for Sanders, a 74-year-old self-described socialist. Third, because Sanders's agenda is hostile to moneyed interests within the Democratic Party.

But if Sanders eventually overtook Clinton, the establishment might resign itself to the prospect of nominating him. There are some loose precedents for candidates like Sanders winning their nominations, especially George McGovern in 1972 and Barry Goldwater in 1964. If you're going to sacrifice a presidential election — and Sanders would be unlikely to prevail next November(4) — you'd at least like to shift the window of discourse in your party's preferred direction.

A Trump nomination would be more of an existential threat to the Republican establishment. He bucks the establishment's consensus on issues as fundamental to the GOP as taxation and health care, and he's wobbly on abortion. Splitting with the party on any one of those issues might ordinarily disqualify a candidate. Trump potentially destabilizes the Republicans' "three-legged stool": The coalition of fiscal, social and national security conservatives have dominated the party since 1980 or so. But on the issue on which Trump is most conservative — immigration — establishment Republicans worry that he might be so reactionary as to cause long-term damage to the party brand.

Meanwhile, Trump has picked fights with sacred cows like the Club for Growth and Fox News. Most of the conservative media — from the National Review to RedState to Glenn Beck — is anti-Trump.

In certain respects, Trump is engaged in an attempted "hostile takeover" of the Republican Party. Because the downside of nominating him might be so enormous — lasting beyond a single election — the GOP establishment may fight to the death to prevent him from being chosen, even at the price of a brokered convention and a fractured party base.

What Sanders and Trump have in common is they're both unlikely to be nominated. (If I were laying odds, I'd put either one at something like 15-1 or 20-1 against.) But it's for different reasons. Sanders is losing now, but if he eventually overtakes Clinton — and if Biden fails to come to the establishment's rescue — his position might become more viable. Trump is nominally winning, but the GOP race is much more volatile. And if he doesn't lose steam on his own accord, the Republican establishment will use every tool at its disposal to stop him.


Footnotes

1.This calculation is based on roll call votes in which both Sanders and the other Democratic senator voted yea or nay, excluding those in which either one missed the vote.  ^
2.According to the DW-Nominate methodology for classifying the president's position.  ^
3.In contrast, consider the odd mix of radical and reactionary positions that Jeremy Corbyn has in the U.K.  ^
4.Unless, perhaps, he faced off against Trump!  ^

[Valmy]

If the Republicans do steal the nomination from him at a brokered convention I hope he walks out like Teddy Roosevelt. Bull Moose in '16

[jimmy olsen]

Woo! America!

The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.

Some amusing pictures can be found here

http://www.sbnation.com/college-football/2015/9/13/9316705/donald-trump-iowa-isu-football-game

I tailgated with drunk Donald Trump fans at Iowa-Iowa State so you don't have to

By Kevin Trahan  @k_trahan  on Sep 13, 2015, 9:42a  19   

eet CYCLONE. We'll call him that because he would not tell me his name. He wore a white shirt with faded red and yellow stripes and a bright Iowa State-colored tie. His hair was spiked up with hair gel, and he reeked of booze.

And he was one of the main attractions at the biggest political and athletic event in the state of Iowa this week: a college football tailgate with Donald Trump. Once CYCLONE was done drunkenly harassing a fellow Iowa State fan for "not having a job," I asked him for an interview.

CYCLONE: "NO!"

ME: "Why?"

CYCLONE: "You're a Democrat. I can tell."

ME: "How can you tell?"

CYCLONE: "Because you're wearing a plaid shirt. You're a Democrat, aren't you?"

ME: "Yeah."

CYCLONE: "Yeah, go back to Univision!"

"I like him," I joked.

"I don't," CYCLONE's father replied.

Iowa and Iowa State fans don't get along when this week comes around. But for the other 51 weeks, these are neighbors, co-workers and friends, who often find common ground on politics, even when they can't on football. And the Trump Tailgate did manage to bring some rivals together for the common causes of Trump, for or against.

Meet HAWKEYE. He was more amicable than CYCLONE, but under the advice of his less-drunk friends, he would likewise not tell me his name. He wore an Iowa polo and a signature Trump "Make America Great Again" hat, with a Coors Light in hand. I asked him why he supported Trump, and he gave the standard response: Trump's not politically correct, he's a good businessman, he's not afraid of anyone, etc.

Then he leaned in and said, "To be honest, man, we're just here to get fucked up."

Getting fucked up is really the whole point of football if you're an Iowa or Iowa State fan. The football isn't fun, but the drinking is. And heated arguing is what a political event is supposed to be about.

Iowans, living in a tone-setting battleground state, are used to having bits of everyday life interjected with politics. Candidates go to the state fair and admire the butter cow. They go to that one restaurant in town, the one people don't really go to, the one that's still a staple because it was 50 years ago. These are safe and boring photo ops.

A Trump Tailgate is neither of those things. It pits two opinionated groups against each other, plus drinking for hours on end. There were no promotional photos, no meet-and-greets with fans too inebriated to participate.

Sadly, this was not a tailgate just for Trump. It was run by the Republican Party of Story County, but there was only one reason anyone was there.

"Tell that scrub to get to the side. We've got Trump coming!" said one guy when Wisconsin governor Scott Walker appeared. Another yelled at the balding candidate about Rogaine. One woman, a self-described Republican, had no idea who Walker was, and the only semi-excited person was a drunk man who told his daughter to shake "Mike Walker's" hand.

If there's anyone who had to really hate this tailgate (booze wasn't provided by the GOP, of course, so it's only a tailgate because of its surroundings), it was the campaign workers. They're unpaid, mostly college students, and live in constant fear that whatever they say will ruin their candidate's campaign.

Like the two guys in Jeb! shirts. A curious Hawkeye fan made the mistake of asking about Bush, and after listening for a good five minutes, the fan thought he'd figured it out.

"So he's the anti-Trump," he said.

"NOOOOOOOOOO," the campaigners screamed in horror.

There were were the Mike Huckabros. They had their hair combed nicely, wore button-downs and looked terrified of what they were witnessing. They were from Georgia, the only information they were willing to share.

There was a small, vocal group of protestors, led mostly by students against Trump. The ever-drunker crowd mocked them more and more. A middle-aged man in a Cyclones shirt to a protestor in non-team clothing:

"You don't support a candidate. You support an idea. An idea can't run. How about Deez Nuts? He comes from Iowa."

"Yeah, that's great," the protestor replied.

Said student protestor Michelle Ramos, "I have to work Saturdays. I'm not a big tailgater. I love my team. Go State or whatever, but I have to work to be able to go to school here."

The drunk crowd showed up later, but at the beginning, there was actually a number of Trump supporters milling about — "all dudes," much to one reporter's chagrin — and defending their renegade leader. Tyler Steiner and Jake Rudeen, both ISU students, wore blue Trump shirts.

"I'm a big fan of his one-liners," Steiner said.

Joining Steiner and Rudeen was their roommate, Ray Washington. But he wasn't there to support anybody.

"I know Trump's gonna have fun," he said.

★★★

About 45 minutes before Trump's scheduled arrival, the crowd had multiplied to quadruple digits. We stood around the Field of Dreams-inspired backdrop for two hours, where increasingly inebriated fans exchanged ideas.
•"I love to look at (FOX's Megyn Kelly), but now I see her true inner side."
•"I don't (support Trump) at all. I just like trolling people. I'm drunk. I love trolling people."
•"I won't vote for him, but I'm gonna shake his hand so I might be on his show some day. What's his show called?"
•One drunk fan who nearly fell into Walker and had a "Don't Make A (Democrat Donkey) Out Of Yourself" shirt on.
•This shirt: [Just say no to Hillary]

The mob was more akin to a group of fans ready to rush the field after a big win than it was to any political setting. Drunk fans stumbled over each other, moving around in hope of getting in front of the one small audio speaker. I asked one veteran political reporter from Washington, DC., whether she had ever seen a rally with supporters this drunk.

"Not this early," she said.

Fans broke out into cheers and sat on shoulders and truck beds, hoping to spot the hero of the hour. Angst set in: was The Donald really going to show? An event organizer told the crowd that it would be half-an-hour to four hours, since a crowd this big was now a security threat. Some dispersed.

Trump wasn't going to show up to his own tailgate.

But as I came back around the bend, I was nearly run over by a stampede of cheering fans and media members. There he was, emerging from the stadium, wearing a tieless suit and a camo "Make America Great Again" hat. Despite being mobbed for autographs and handshakes, he marched through the Jack Trice Stadium parking lots.

The speech lasted less than a minute. It was the most vanilla of any candidate's. It touched on no issues, and he asked no questions, other than whom everyone was cheering for. It was a christening, not a stump speech.

Once he stepped down from his throne, he beelined for a waiting SUV.

"I touched him!" yelled one girl, telling anyone who would listen. Trump actually showed up. To a tailgate basically in his honor. At the Iowa-Iowa State game. To cheer with a bunch of drunk fans.

No matter our politics, there's one thing we can all agree on: this sure as hell has never happened before.

[Valmy]

College Football is a wonderful thing 

I wonder if David Cameron ever goes drinking with soccer hooligans.

[Martinus]

College Football is a wonderful thing 

I wonder if David Cameron ever goes drinking with soccer hooligans.

If he did, they'd probably beat him up for being a poofter if he asked them about scrum.

[The Brain]

Woo! America!

No thanks.

[jimmy olsen]

Looks like all those rule changes that were made to shorten rhe nominating process favor Trump.

On the positive side for polisci fans there's speculation of a brokered convention with the Donald as one of the main  power brokers.
.
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/09/20/us/new-party-rules-fail-to-speed-up-republican-race.html?referrer=

Party Rules to Streamline Race May Backfire for G.O.P.


By ADAM NAGOURNEY and JONATHAN MARTIN
SEPTEMBER 19, 2015

LOS ANGELES — When gloomy Republican Party leaders regrouped after President Obama's 2012 re-election, they were intent on enhancing the party's chances of winning back the White House. The result: new rules to head off a prolonged and divisive nomination fight, and to make certain the Republican standard-bearer is not pulled too far to the right before Election Day.

But as the sprawling class of 2016 Republican presidential candidates tumbled out of their chaotic second debate last week, it was increasingly clear that those rule changes — from limiting the number of debates to adjusting how delegates are allocated — had failed to bring to the nominating process the order and speed that party leaders had craved.

In interviews, Republican leaders and strategists said that rather than having a presumptive nominee by early 2016, who could turn to the tasks of raising money and making the case against the Democratic candidates, it was doubtful that a candidate would be in place before late spring — or even before Republicans gather for their convention in Cleveland in July.

And they said they were increasingly convinced that Donald J. Trump could exploit openings created by the party's revised rules to capture the nomination or, short of that, to amass enough delegates to be a power broker at the convention.


"You've got a set of unintended consequences that weren't planned for," said Richard F. Hohlt, a Republican donor and Washington lobbyist. "So it's going to be harder for a candidate to get to the magic number, which could open up the process to a convention situation."


To some extent, this reflects forces beyond the party's control. Conservative activists have shown little appetite for Republicans who play by traditional rules. They, and the right-tilting candidates they are supporting, may be in even less of a mood to acquiesce at a time when Republican leaders in Washington, despite controlling both houses in Congress, have been unable to stop or even slow Mr. Obama's nuclear accord with Iran, and are struggling in their bid to deny funding to Planned Parenthood.

More than ever, too, the party is grappling with campaign finance laws that allow candidates with wealthy private backers, such as former Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida and Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, to stay in the race even if they do poorly in early nominating contests in Iowa and New Hampshire.

But the evolving Republican landscape also suggests that the party's changes, like squeezing primaries into a shorter period in hopes that one candidate would break through, are proving no match for a field this big and rambunctious, powered by the forces of populism and anger at Washington, and financed by wealthy benefactors.


As a result, the campaigns are preparing for a marathon delegate battle, and have begun building organizations in territories as far-flung as Guam and American Samoa. An adviser to Mr. Cruz's campaign, Dennis Lennox, has island-hopped through the Pacific this month, discussing local issues like the airfares between Honolulu and Pago Pago, in search of a stray delegate who might support the senator. And on a conference call with donors the morning after Wednesday's debate, Danny Diaz, the manager for Mr. Bush's campaign, ran down its operations in states well beyond New Hampshire and Iowa, according to a participant on the call.

The prospect of a long and contentious nomination fight is only one reason for concern. The three-hour debate, at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library near here, suggested that Republican leaders had yet to realize their hope of keeping primary contenders from moving far to the right, complicating a general election bid, as happened to Mitt Romney in 2012. The candidates staked out conservative positions on a variety of topics — immigration, abortion, same-sex marriage and vaccinations for children — that, if appealing in such early Republican states as Iowa and South Carolina, could prove problematic in a general election.

In the starkest sign of how unsettled the situation is, what once seemed unthinkable — that Mr. Trump could win the Republican nomination — is being treated by many within the Republican establishment as a serious possibility. And one reason his candidacy seems strong is a change by the party in hopes of ending the process earlier: making it possible for states to hold contests in which the winner receives all the delegates, rather than a share based on the vote, starting March 15, two weeks earlier than in the last cycle. Ten states have said they will do so.

If Mr. Trump draws one-third of the Republican primary vote, as recent polls suggest he will, that could be enough to win in a crowded field. After March 15, he could begin amassing all the delegates in a given state even if he carried it with only a third of the vote. And the later it gets, the harder it becomes for a lead in delegates to be overcome, with fewer state contests remaining in which trailing candidates can attempt comebacks.

"Somebody like Trump, who is operating in a crowded field, could put this contest away early if the crowd doesn't thin out," said Eric Fehrnstrom, who was a senior adviser to Mr. Romney.

Steve Schmidt, a senior adviser to Senator John McCain of Arizona when he ran for president in 2008, said Mr. Trump could also be helped by the fact that candidates like Ben Carson and Carly Fiorina, with thinner financial resources and therefore likelier to run out of money, are, like Mr. Trump, political outsiders. So their supporters would be more inclined to fall in behind Mr. Trump than, say, Mr. Bush or Senator Marco Rubio of Florida.

"There is a bubble of delusion among Republicans and Democrats in Washington, D.C., with regard to their parties' respective nominating processes," Mr. Schmidt said. "There is no magic date upon which the air will come out of the Donald Trump balloon. The notion that Donald Trump cannot be the Republican nominee is completely and totally wrong."

The Republican rule changes reflected the lessons learned from Mr. Romney's defeat, after a long primary fight left him short of money and pulled to the right on issues, weakening him among undecided voters when he faced Mr. Obama. The party compressed its nominating calendar to try to make the process end sooner, limited the number of debates, moved the convention to July from August, barred all but the traditional early nominating states from holding contests until March and shortened the period in which states could hold primaries or caucuses that award delegates proportionally.


But this was a remedy for a very different campaign from the one now being waged. With 15 candidates in the field, and Mr. Trump at the center of the action, the debates have become ratings bonanzas for the networks and drawn record-setting viewership. And many states, eager to play a more influential role, seized the opportunity to schedule their nominating contests earlier. Eight states in the conservative-dominated South, where insurgent candidates like Mr. Trump could do well, have created a Super Tuesday on March 1, when delegates must still be awarded proportionally.

"It's going to go on for a while," said Karl Rove, a Republican strategist, noting how many delegates will have been distributed after the March 1 contests. "What happens if you have 30 percent of delegates already allocated and nobody has more than 25 percent of them?"

In Washington, some longtime Republican hands have begun conversations about how to handle a race that could last through the last day of voting on June 7, when five states representing about 15 percent of all delegates, including California and New Jersey, cast their ballots.

Republicans say the unpredictable Mr. Trump's intentions are difficult to discern, speculating that he may not be willing to endure a monthslong delegate chase, and it remains unclear whether he has the organization to pull off any delegate wins.

But the fact that discussions about such arcane matters as bound versus unbound delegates are already taking place underscores the potential for chaos.

It also represents a grudging concession that Mr. Trump may not fade from the scene — and that even if he ultimately loses, he is likely to have enough delegates to be a force at the convention.

"There's a growing sense that Donald is going to be in the final four," said Phil Musser, a Republican strategist. "That means Donald with delegates. And Donald with delegates means an enhanced ability to shape the race."

Some Republicans still wince when recalling how Pat Buchanan's 1992 challenge to President George Bush resulted in his winning a prime-time speaking slot at the convention that renominated Mr. Bush.

"And that set the tone for the election," Mr. Hohlt recalled of Mr. Buchanan's fiery speech. "Do we end up again in one of those kinds of deals?"

[jimmy olsen]

Not sure if I agree with him, but the article is a cracking good read. 

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/09/frank-rich-in-praise-of-donald-trump.html#

As the summer of Donald Trump came to its end — and the prospect of a springtime for Trump no longer seemed like a gag — the quest to explain the billionaire's runaway clown car went into overdrive. How could a crass, bigoted bully with a narcissistic-personality disorder and policy views bordering on gibberish "defy political gravity," dominate the national stage, make monkeys out of pundits and pollsters, and pose an existential threat to one of America's two major parties?

Of course, it was the news media's fault: The Washington Post charted the correlation between Trump's national polling numbers and his disproportionate press coverage. Or maybe the public was to blame: Op-ed writers dusted off their sermons about Americans' childish infatuation with celebrities and reality television. Or perhaps Trump was just the GOP's answer to the "outsider" Bernie Sanders — even though Sanders, unlike Trump, has a coherent ideology and has spent nearly a quarter-century of his so-called outsider's career in Congress. Still others riffled through historical precedents, from the third-party run of the cranky billionaire Ross Perot back to Huey Long and Father Charles Coughlin, the radio-savvy populist demagogues of the Great Depression. Or might Trump be the reincarnation of Joseph McCarthy (per the Times' Thomas Friedman), Hugo Chávez (the Wall Street Journal's Bret Stephens), or that avatar of white-racist resentment, George Wallace (George Will)? The historian Richard Hofstadter's Goldwater-era essay on "the paranoid style" in American politics was once again in vogue.

In the midst of all the hand-wringing from conservatives and liberals alike, Politico convened a panel of historians to adjudicate. Two authoritative chroniclers of 20th-century American populism and race, Alan Brinkley of Columbia and David Blight of Yale, dismissed the parallels. Brinkley, the author of the definitive book on Long and Coughlin (Voices of Protest), said Trump was a first in American politics, a presidential candidate with no "belief system other than the certainty that anything he says is right." Blight said Trump's "real antecedents are in Mark Twain" — in other words, fictional characters, and funny ones.

There is indeed a lighter way to look at Trump's rise and his impact on the country. Far from being an apocalyptic harbinger of the end-times, it's possible that his buffoonery poses no lasting danger. Quite the contrary: His unexpected monopoly of center stage may well be the best thing to happen to our politics since the arrival of Barack Obama.


In the short time since Trump declared his candidacy, he has performed a public service by exposing, however crudely and at times inadvertently, the posturings of both the Republicans and the Democrats and the foolishness and obsolescence of much of the political culture they share. He is, as many say, making a mockery of the entire political process with his bull-in-a-china-shop antics. But the mockery in this case may be overdue, highly warranted, and ultimately a spur to reform rather than the crime against civic order that has scandalized those who see him, in the words of the former George W. Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson, as "dangerous to democracy."

Trump may be injecting American democracy with steroids. No one, after all, is arguing that the debates among the GOP presidential contenders would be drawing remotely their Game of Thrones-scale audiences if the marquee stars were Jeb Bush and Scott Walker. When most of the field — minus Trump — appeared ahead of the first debate at a New Hampshire forum broadcast on C-SPAN, it caused little more stir than a soporific pageant of congressional backbenchers addressing the empty floor of the House. Without Trump, even a relatively tame Trump, would anyone have sat through even a third of the three-hour-plus trainwreck that CNN passed off as the second debate?

What has made him more entertaining than his peers is not his superficial similarities to any historical analogues or his shopworn celebrity. His passport to political stardom has been his uncanny resemblance to a provocative fictional comic archetype that has been an invigorating staple of American movies since Vietnam and Watergate ushered in wholesale disillusionment with Washington four decades ago. That character is a direct descendant of Twain's 19th-century confidence men: the unhinged charlatan who decides to blow up the system by running for office — often the presidency — on a platform of outrageous pronouncements and boorish behavior. Trump has taken that role, the antithesis of the idealist politicians enshrined by Frank Capra and Aaron Sorkin, and run with it. He bestrides our current political landscape like the reincarnation not of Joe McCarthy (that would be Ted Cruz) but of Jay Billington Bulworth.

Trump's shenanigans sometimes seem to be lifted directly from the eponymous 1998 movie, in which Warren Beatty plays a senator from California who abandons his scripted bromides to take up harsh truth-telling in rap: "Wells Fargo and Citibank, you're really very dear / Loan billions to Mexico and never have to fear / 'Cause taxpayers take it in the rear." Bulworth insults the moderators of a television debate, addresses his Hollywood donors as "big Jews," and infuriates a black constituent by telling her he'll ignore her unless she shells out to his campaign. Larry King, cast as himself, books him on his show because "people are sick and tired of all this baloney" and crave an unplugged politician who calls Washington "a disaster."

Trump also sounds like Hal Phillip Walker, the unseen candidate of the "Replacement Party" whose campaign aphorisms percolate throughout Robert Altman's post-Watergate state-of-the-union comic epic, Nashville (1975). His platform includes eliminating farm subsides, taxing churches, banning lawyers from government, and jettisoning the national anthem because "nobody knows the words, nobody can sing it, nobody understands it." (Francis Scott Key was a lawyer.) In résumé and beliefs, Trump is even closer to the insurgent candidate played by Tim Robbins and reviled as "a crypto-fascist clown" in the mockumentary Bob Roberts (1992) — a self-congratulatory right-wing Wall Street success story, beauty-pageant aficionado, and folksinging star whose emblematic song is titled "Retake America." Give Trump time, and we may yet find him quoting the accidental president played by Chris Rock in Head of State (2003): "If America was a woman, she would be a big-tittied woman. Everybody loves a big-tittied woman!"

Thanks to Trump, this character has leaped off the screen into real life, like the Hollywood leading man in Woody Allen's The Purple Rose of Cairo. As a human torpedo blasting through the 2016 campaign, Trump can inflict more damage, satirical and otherwise, than any fictional prototype ever could. In his great comic novel of 1959, The Magic Christian, Terry Southern anticipated just the kind of ruckus a Trump could make. Southern's protagonist is a billionaire named Guy Grand who spends his fortune on elaborate pranks to disrupt almost every sector of American life — law enforcement, advertising, newspapers, movies, television, sports, the space program. Like Trump, he operates on the premise that everyone can be bought. In one typical venture, he pays the actor playing "an amiable old physician" on a live network medical drama a million bucks to stop in mid-surgery and tell the audience that if he speaks "one more line of this drivel," he'll "vomit right into that incision I've made." The network, FCC, and press go into a tizzy until viewers, hoping to see more such outrages, start rewarding the show with record ratings.

There have already been some modest precedents for Trump's real-life prank — most recently, Stephen Colbert, who staged a brief stunt run for president in 2007. The comic Pat Paulsen, a Smothers Brothers acolyte, ran for president intermittently from 1968 into the '90s, aiming to call attention to the absurdity of politics. His first run was under the banner of the STAG (Straight Talking American Government) Party; later, he ran consecutively as a Republican and a Democrat. ("I like to mix it up," he explained.) Paulsen came in a (very) distant second to Bill Clinton in the 1996 New Hampshire primary, one of four primaries where he qualified for the ballot that year. But a judge threw him off the ballot in California, declaring, "I do not want to reduce the campaign for an important office like president of the United States to some kind of farce."

Some kind of farce, nonetheless, is just what the modern presidential campaign has devolved into. By calling attention to that sorry state of affairs 24/7, Trump's impersonation of a crypto-fascist clown is delivering the most persuasively bipartisan message of 2016.


Trump lacks the comic chops of a Colbert or Paulsen, and, unlike the screenwriters of movies like Bulworth and Nashville, he is witless. His instrument of humor is the bitch-slap, blunt and cruel — Don Rickles dumbed down to the schoolyard. But when he hits a worthy target and exerts himself beyond his usual repertoire of lazy epithets (Loser! Dope! Slob!), he is funny, in part because his one-liners have the ring of truth. When Eric Cantor endorsed Jeb Bush, Trump asked, "Who wants the endorsement of a guy who lost in perhaps the greatest upset in the history of Congress?" When Trump's presidential rivals attended a David and Charles Koch retreat, he tweeted: "I wish good luck to all of the Republican candidates that traveled to California to beg for money etc. from the Koch brothers. Puppets?" Twitter inspires his best material, as does Bush. Among Trump's many Bush put-downs is this classic: "Why would you pay a man $1.3 million a year for a no-show job at Lehman Brothers — which, when it folded, almost took the world with it?" The exclamation point in Bush's sad campaign logo, JEB!, has effectively been downsized to a semicolon by Trump's insistence on affixing the modifier "low-energy" to his name every chance he gets.

The most significant Trump insult thus far is the one that heralded his hostile takeover of the GOP. The target was Reince Priebus, the overmatched Republican National Committee chairman. Following the debacle of 2012, Priebus had vowed that his party would reach out to minorities and curb the xenophobic and misogynist invective that drives away the voters without whom it cannot win national elections. When Trump lampooned John McCain's sacred record as a POW as gleefully as Republicans had Swift Boated John Kerry, the chairman saw his best-laid plans for a "big tent" GOP imperiled by an unauthorized sideshow. "Party donors," no doubt with his blessing, let it be known to the Washington Post that, in a lengthy phone conversation, he had persuaded Trump to "tone it down." Hardly had the story surfaced when Trump shot it down: He said Priebus's call had been brief and flattering, and that he hadn't agreed to change a thing. As Priebus beat a hasty retreat, Trump joked that manipulating him wasn't exactly like "dealing with a five-star Army general." Soon the chastened chairman was proclaiming Trump a "net positive" for his party. When Trump deigned to sign a faux legal document pledging not to run as a third-party candidate, Priebus had to show up at Trump Tower to bear witness, like a lackey summoned to an audience with the boss. That "pledge" served Trump's immediate goal of securing his spot on primary ballots, but come next year it will carry no more weight than a certificate from the now-defunct Trump University.

Trump's ability to reduce the head of his adopted party to a comic functionary out of a Gilbert-and-Sullivan operetta is typical of his remarkable success in exposing Republican weakness and hypocrisy. The party Establishment has been trying to erect a firewall against the onslaught by claiming, as George Will has it, that Trump is a "counterfeit" Republican and that even "the assumption that today's Trumpites are Republicans is unsubstantiated and implausible." Thus voters should discount Trump's "bimbo" tweets, anti-immigration fulminations, and rants about Mexican "rapists" as a wild man's ravings that don't represent a party that reveres women, welcomes immigrants, and loves Hispanics. The Wall Street Journal editorial page, in its own effort to inoculate the GOP from Trump, disparages him as a "casino magnate" — an epithet it doesn't hurl at Sheldon Adelson, the still-bigger casino magnate who serves as sugar daddy to the neocon hawks the Journal favors.

Trump does take heretical economic positions for a Republican — "The hedge-fund guys are getting away with murder!" — but on the matters of race, women, and immigration that threaten the GOP's future viability in nonwhite, non-male America, he is at one with his party's base. What he does so rudely is call the GOP's bluff by saying loudly, unambiguously, and repeatedly the ugly things that other Republican politicians try to camouflage in innuendo, focus-group-tested euphemisms, and consultantspeak.

In reality, Trump's most noxious views have not only been defended by conservative stars like Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, and late summer's No. 1 best-selling nonfiction author, the radio host Mark Levin, but also by the ostensibly more "mainstream" Republican candidates. Trump is picking up where his vocal fan Sarah Palin left off and is for that reason by far the favored candidate of tea-party Republicans, according to a Labor Day CNN-ORC poll. Take Trump's peddling of "birtherism," for instance. It's been a right-wing cause since well before he took it up; even Mitt Romney dipped into that racist well in 2012. It took a village of birthers to get Republicans to the point where only 29 percent of them now believe that Obama was born in America (and 54 percent identify him as a Muslim), according to an August survey by Public Policy Polling. Far from being a fake Republican, Trump speaks for the party's overwhelming majority.

Charles Krauthammer, another conservative apoplectic about Trump's potential to sabotage the GOP's 2016 chances, is arguing that Trump's incendiary immigration stand is also counterfeit Republicanism — an aberrational "policy innovation." The only problem is that Cruz, Walker, Lindsey Graham, Bobby Jindal, Rand Paul, and Ben Carson have all supported Trump's "policy innovation" calling for an end to the "birthright citizenship" guaranteed by the 14th Amendment. In Pew's latest survey on the issue — taken in May, before Trump was in the race — 47 percent of Republicans agreed as well. Even more Republicans (62 percent) support building a wall along the Mexican border (as does Krauthammer), much as they did in 2012 when Herman Cain did Trump one better by proposing an "electrified fence." Trump's draconian call for deporting illegal immigrants en masse is also genuine, not counterfeit, Republicanism. Romney had not only argued for "self-deportation" in his last presidential campaign but in 2008 had called for newly arrived illegal immigrants to be deported immediately and for the rest to be given just enough time "to organize their affairs and go home."

With women, too, Trump embarrasses the GOP by saying in public what "real" Republicans keep private. The telling moment in the Fox News debate was not when Megyn Kelly called him out for slurring women as "fat pigs" and "dogs" but the cheers from the audience at Trump's retort, in which he directed those same epithets at Rosie O'Donnell. (No one onstage protested.) When Trump attacked Kelly the next day in language that seemed to refer to menstruation, most of his GOP rivals made a show of rallying around Kelly. But the party's real stand on the sanctity of female biology had been encapsulated in the debate by Walker's and Marco Rubio's endorsement of a ban on abortions for women who have been raped or risk dying in childbirth. No wonder Trump's bloodying of Kelly gave him another uptick in polls of Republican voters.

Republican potentates can't fight back against him because the party's base has his back. He's ensnared the GOP Establishment in a classic Catch-22: It wants Trump voters — it can't win elections without them — but doesn't want Trump calling attention to what those voters actually believe. Poor Bush, once the Establishment's great legacy hope, is so ill-equipped to pander to the base that he outdid Trump in defending the nativist term anchor babies by applying it to Asians as well as Mexicans. (Bush also started mimicking Trump's vilification of hedge-fund managers.) The candidates who have gone after Trump with the greatest gusto — Graham, Paul, Carly Fiorina, Jindal, George Pataki — have been so low in the polls they had nothing to lose. (Even so, all except Fiorina have fallen farther after doing so — or, in Rick Perry's case, fallen out of the race altogether.) The others were painfully slow to challenge him. That cowardice was foretold in June when most of the presidential field waited days to take a stand against the Confederate flag following the Charleston massacre. If they're afraid to come out against slavery a century after Appomattox, it only follows that they'd cower before a billionaire who insults his male adversaries' manhood as reflexively as he attacks women's looks. As Steve Schmidt, the 2008 McCain campaign manager, has said, Trump had all but emasculated Bush by the time Bush belatedly started fighting back. In the second debate, Fiorina finished the job by counterpunching Trump with more vigor than Bush could muster.


All of this should make Democrats feel pretty confident about 2016. A couple of conspiracy theorists on the right have speculated that Trump is a Hillary Clinton plant. But Trump has hurt Clinton too. Her penchant for dodging controversial questions — fracking, the Keystone pipeline, the Trans-Pacific trade pact — looks still worse when contrasted with Trump's shoot-from-the-hip decisiveness. Even when asked to name her favorite ice-cream flavor during a July appearance at a New Hampshire Dairy Twirl, she could do no better than "I like nearly everything."

It's not a coincidence that the Joe Biden buzz heated up just as Trump started taking off. The difference between Clinton's and Biden's views is negligible, but some Democrats may be in the market for a candidate of their own who will wander off the reservation and say anything in the echt Trump manner. Yesterday's "gaffes" are today's authenticity. Whatever happens with Biden, the Clinton campaign seems oblivious to the possibility that Trump is a double-edged sword, exposing her weaknesses even as he undermines the GOP. When he boasted in the Fox News debate that the Clintons had no choice but to attend his last wedding because he had given them money, he reduced the cloudy questions about transactions between the Clinton Foundation and its donors to a primal quid pro quo that any voter can understand.

As the Trump fallout has rained down on Clinton, so it has on the news media and political pros who keep writing his premature obituary. He has been dismissed as a lackluster also-ran in both debates — compared to the "impressive" Fiorina, Rubio, John Kasich, whoever. No one seems to have considered that more Republican primary voters may have cared about Tom Brady's endorsement of Trump hours before the CNN debate than the substance of the event itself. Throughout, Trump's rise has been accompanied by a veritable "Dewey Defeats Truman" festival. After the McCain smackdown in July, political analysts at the Times, the Washington Post, and CNN all declared that he had reached a "turning point" presaging his demise. The Times'version of this consensus ran as a column in "The Upshot," the paper's rubric for data-driven reporting. It argued that because Republican "elites" had been outraged by the incident, it would "probably mark the moment when Trump's candidacy went from boom to bust." This conclusion ultimately proved no more predictive than the ostensibly data-driven Literary Digest poll proclaiming Alf Landon the certain victor over FDR in 1936. Given the hostility of the GOP base to elites in general and McCain in particular (unless he's on a ticket with Palin), it was a better-than-even bet that Trump's numbers would go up, as they did.

An "Upshot" entry almost two weeks after the Fox News debate dug in further: "The Most Important Story in the G.O.P. Race Isn't About Donald Trump." The more important story, it turned out, was the relative "boomlets" for the not-Trump candidates. But Trump continued to be the most important story, not least because of how he kept drowning out the supposed boomlets of the other candidates. Trump, we've been told, is sucking the oxygen out of a GOP contest whose other contenders constitute a "deep bench of talent" (the Times) and "an embarrassment of riches" (Peggy Noonan). But Trump is the oxygen of the GOP race, and that deep bench's embarrassing inability to compete with him is another important story. Even so, guardians of journalistic propriety (and some readers) have implored the upscale press to resist emulating cable news and stop paying Trump so much attention. Some journalists who condescended to write about him have asked forgiveness for momentarily forsaking sober policy debate and stooping so low. The Huffington Post announced it was relegating Trump coverage to the Entertainment section.

That summer of denial is now kaput, but many of the press's usual empirical tools are impotent against Trump. Columnists and editorial writers across the political spectrum can keep preaching to their own choirs about how vile he is, but they are not likely being read, let alone heeded, by Trump fans. Diligent analyses of his policy inconsistencies are built on a false premise because Trump has almost no policies, just ad hoc opinions that by his own account he forms mainly by reading newspapersor watching Sunday talk shows. When writers for both the Times and Journal op-ed pages analyzed Trumponomics, they produced the same verdict: Nothing Trump said added up. Kimberley Strassel, a conservative columnist at the Journal who regards the Republican field as "teeming with serious candidates," has complained that Trump is "not policy knowledgeable." That's for sure. You won't catch him following the example of "serious" candidates like Fiorina, Rubio, and Walker, who regurgitate the boilerplate drilled into them by foreign-policy tutors. Why bother, Trump explains, since "one of the problems with foreign policy is it changes on a daily basis." Such thinking, or anti-thinking, may not win over anyone at the Aspen Institute or the American Enterprise Institute, but does anyone seriously doubt that it plays to much of the Republican-primary electorate? That's precisely what is spooking conservatives like Strassel.


What's exhilarating, even joyous, about Trump has nothing to do with his alternately rancid and nonsensical positions on policy. It's that he's exposing the phoniness of our politicians and the corruption of our political process by defying the protocols of the whole game. He skips small-scale meet-and-greets in primary-state living rooms and diners. He turned down an invitation to appear at the influential freshman senator Joni Ernst's hog roast in Iowa. He routinely denigrates sacred GOP cows like Karl Rove and the Club for Growth. He has blown off the most powerful newspapers in the crucial early states of Iowa (the Des Moines Register) and New Hampshire (the Union-Leader) and paid no political price for it. Yet he is overall far more accessible to the press than most candidates — most conspicuously Clinton — which in turn saves him from having to buy television ad time.

It's as if Trump were performing a running burlesque of the absurd but intractable conventions of presidential campaigns in real time. His impact on our politics post-2016 could be as serious as he is not. Unsurprisingly, the shrewdest description of the Trump show's appeal has come from an actor, Owen Wilson. "You can't help but get a kick out of him," he told the Daily Beast, "and I think part of it is we're so used to politicians on both sides sounding like actors at press junkets — it's sort of by rote, and they say all the right things. So here's somebody who's not following that script. It's like when Charlie Sheen was doing that stuff." As Wilson says, for all the efforts to dismiss Trump as an entertainer, in truth it's his opponents who are more likely to be playacting, reciting their politically correct and cautious lines by rote. The political market for improvisational candor is as large as it was after Vietnam and Watergate, and right now Trump pretty much has a monopoly on it.

He also makes a sport of humiliating high-end campaign gurus. When Sam Clovis, a powerful Evangelical conservative activist in Iowa, jumped from the cratering Perry to Trump in August, it seemed weird. Despite saying things like "I'm strongly into the Bible," Trump barely pretends to practice any religion. The Des Moines Register soon published excerpts from emails written just five weeks earlier (supplied by Perry allies) in which Clovis had questioned Trump's "moral center" and lack of "foundation in Christ" and praised Perry for calling Trump "a cancer on conservatism." But, like Guy Grand in The Magic Christian, Trump figured correctly that money spoke louder than Christ to Clovis. He was no less shrewd in bringing the focus-group entrepreneur Frank Luntz to heel. After Luntz convened a negative post-debate panel on Fox News that, in Luntz's view, signaled "the destruction" of Trump's campaign, Trump showered him with ridicule. Luntz soon did a Priebus-style about-face and convened a new panel that amounted to a Trump lovefest. One participant praised Trump for not mouthing "that crap" that's been "pushed to us for the past 40 years." It's unclear if Luntz was aware of the irony of his having been a major (and highly compensated) pusher of "that crap," starting with his role in contriving the poll-shaped pablum of Newt Gingrich's bogus "Contract With America."

A perfect paradigm of how lame old-school, top-heavy campaigns can be was crystallized by a single story on the front page of the Times the day after Labor Day. Its headline said it all: "Clinton Aides Set New Focus for Campaign — A More Personal Tone of Humor and Heart." By announcing this "new focus" to the Times, which included "new efforts to bring spontaneity" to a candidacy that "sometimes seems wooden," these strategists were at once boasting of their own (supposed) political smarts and denigrating their candidate, who implicitly was presented as incapable of being human without their direction and scripts. Hilariously enough, the article straight-facedly cited as expert opinion the former Romney strategist Eric Fehrnstrom — whose stewardship of the most wooden candidate in modern memory has apparently vanished into a memory hole — to hammer home the moral that "what matters is you appear genuine."

We also learned from this piece that Clinton would soon offer "a more contrite tone" when discussing her email woes, because a focus group "revealed that voters wanted to hear directly from Mrs. Clinton" about it. The aides, who gave the Times "extensive interviews," clearly thought that this story was a plus for their candidate, and maybe the candidate did, too, since she didn't fire them on the spot. They all seemed unaware of the downside of portraying Clinton as someone who delegated her "heart" to political operatives and her calibration of contrition to a focus group. By offering a stark contrast to such artifice, the spontaneous, unscripted Trump is challenging the validity and value of the high-priced campaign strategists, consultants, and pollsters who dominate our politics, shape journalistic coverage, and persuade even substantial candidates to outsource their souls to focus groups and image doctors. That brand of politics has had a winning run ever since the young television producer Roger Ailes used his media wiles to create a "new Nixon" in 1968. But in the wake of Trump's "unprofessional" candidacy, many of the late-20th-century accoutrements of presidential campaigns, often tone-deaf and counterproductive in a new era where social media breeds insurgencies like Obama's, Trump's and Sanders's, could be swept away — particularly if Clinton's campaign collapses.

Another change Trump may bring about is a GOP rethinking of its embrace of the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision unleashing unlimited campaign contributions. Citizens United was supposed to be a weapon wielded mainly against Democrats, but Trump is using it as a club to bludgeon Republicans. "I'm using my own money," he said when announcing his candidacy. "I'm not using lobbyists, I'm not using donors. I don't care. I'm really rich." By Washington etiquette, it's a no-no for a presidential candidate to gloat about his wealth. Especially if you're a wealthy Republican, it's axiomatic that you follow the George H.W. Bush template of pretending to savor pork rinds. But Trump has made a virtue of flaunting his fortune and glitzy lifestyle — and not just because that's the authentic Trump. His self-funding campaign may make him more effective than any Democrat in turning Citizens United into a political albatross for those who are enslaved to it.

Having no Citizens United–enabled political-action committee frees him to remind voters daily that his Republican adversaries are bought and paid for by anonymous wealthy donors. The notion of a billionaire playing this populist card may seem counterintuitive, but paradoxically Trump's populism is enhanced by the source of his own billions. His signature business, real-estate development, is concrete, literally so: He builds big things, thus visibly creating jobs, and stamps his name on them in uppercase gold lest anyone forget (even when he hasn't actually built them and doesn't actually own them). This instantly separates him from the "hedge-fund guys" and all the other unpopular one percenters who trade in intangible and suspect financial "products," facilitate the outsourcing of American jobs, and underwrite much of the Republican presidential field and party infrastructure, to some of the Republican-primary electorate's dismay. The simplicity and transparency of Trump's campaign funding are going to make it harder for his rivals — and perhaps future presidential candidates — to defend their dependence on shadowy, plutocratic, and politically toxic PAC donors.


The best news about Trump is that he is wreaking this havoc on the status quo while having no chance of ascending to the presidency. You can't win the Electoral College in 2016 by driving away women, Hispanics, blacks, and Asian-Americans, no matter how large the margins you pile up in deep-red states. Republicans who have started fretting that he'd perform as Barry Goldwater did on Election Day in 1964 have good reason to worry.

But Goldwater won the nomination in the first place by rallying a disaffected hard-right base that caught the GOP Establishment by surprise, much as the remnants of that Establishment were blindsided by Ronald Reagan's insurgency that almost denied the nomination to Gerald Ford in 1976. Trump's ascent, like the Goldwater and Reagan rebellions, makes it less likely that the divide between the GOP's angriest grassroots and the party elites who write the checks will be papered over in 2016, as it was by the time the 2008 and 2012 Republican conventions came to order.

Probable as it may be that Trump's poll numbers will fade and that he will flame out before the Republicans convene in Cleveland in July, it's not a sure thing. If the best his intraparty adversaries can come up with as dragon slayers are his fellow outsiders — the joyless scold Fiorina, who presided over the firing of 30,000 Hewlett-Packard workers (a bounteous gift to Democratic attack ads), or the low-low-energy Carson, who has never run anything except an operating room — that means they have no plan. And thanks to another unintended consequence of the GOP's Citizens United "victory," the PACs it enables will keep hopeless presidential candidates financially afloat no matter how poorly they are faring in polls and primaries, thereby crippling the party's ability to unite early behind a single anti-Trump alternative. In a worst-case scenario, the GOP could reach the spring stretch with the party's one somebody still ahead of a splintered field of nobodies.

By then, Trump's Establishment nemeses, those who march to the beat of the Journal editorial page and Krauthammer and Will, will be manning the backroom battle stations and writing big checks to bring him down. The specter of a brokered Republican convention loomed briefly in 2012, when Romney was slow to lock up the nomination. Should such a scenario rear up again in 2016, the Koch brothers, no fans of Trump, could be at the center of the action. Whatever happens, there will be blood. The one thing Trump never does is go quietly, and neither will his followers. As Ross Douthat, a reform conservative, wrote in August, Trump has tapped into the populist resentments of middle-class voters who view the GOP and the elites who run it as tools of "moneyed interests." If the Republicans "find a way to crush Trump without adapting to his message," he added, the pressure of that resentment will keep building within the party, and "when it bursts, the GOP as we know it may go with it."

Even if this drama does not play out to the convention, the Trump campaign has already made a difference. Far from being a threat to democracy or a freak show unworthy of serious coverage, it matters because it's taking a much-needed wrecking ball to some of what has made our sterile politics and dysfunctional government as bankrupt as Trump's Atlantic City casinos. If that's entertainment, so be it. If Hillary Clinton's campaign or the Republican Party is reduced to rubble along the way, we can live with it. Trump will not make America great again, but there's at least a chance that the chaos he sows will clear the way for those who can.


*This article appears in the September 21, 2015 issue of New York Magazine.

[jimmy olsen]

Trumpmentum intensifies!

http://www.forbes.com/sites/johnzogby/2015/09/20/zogby-poll-trump-widens-lead-after-gop-debate/

Sep 20, 2015 @ 08:42 PM 56,348 views

Zogby Poll: Trump Widens Lead After GOP Debate

No one besides Donald Trump has broken away from the pack. (AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall)

Real estate mogul Trump has widened his lead to 20 points in a brand new Zogby Analytics poll taken after the second Republican presidential debate. The new poll of 405 likely Republican primary/caucus voters nationwide with a margin of sampling error of +/- 5.0 percentage points, conducted September 18-19, shows Mr. Trump with 33% (up 2 points from his pre-debate 31%). In second place is neurosurgeon Dr. Ben Carson who actually dropped 3 points to 13%. Former Hewlett Packard CEO Carly Fiorina, widely considered to be the big winner in the debate, moved up from just 2% last week to 7% and fourth place in the new poll – just 2 points behind former Florida Governor Jeb Bush's 9% (which is exactly where he was last week).

Texas Senator Ted Cruz moves up a point to 5%, followed by Florida Senator Marco Rubio, Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, and Ohio Governor John Kasich all tied at 4%. New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who by many accounts, had a good debate night, stayed at 3%.

The biggest losers in the post-debate poll – besides Dr. Carson's drop – were Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker who fell from 5% to 2% and former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee who polled 2% (down from 4%).

Mr. Trump's lead is across the board, among most major sub-groups – 36% among men, 30% with women, 30% Republicans, 39% independents, 29% moderates, and 31% conservatives.

Dr. Carson's best showings were among Republicans 14%, and conservatives 16%. Mrs. Fiorina did better among men (9%) than women (5%) and Republicans 8% than independents (5%). Mr. Bush scored 10% with women, 8% with men, 12% moderates, but just 6% among conservatives.

The poll was conducted in the middle of controversies regarding negative attitudes toward Muslims expressed by both Mr. Trump and Dr. Carson. Mrs. Fiorina gained the most traction from the debate but no one besides Mr. Trump has broken away from the pack.

[jimmy olsen]

He's really a diabolical mastermind!

http://www.salon.com/2015/09/21/donald_trump_is_americas_mad_prophet_how_hes_ushering_in_a_terrifying_new_age_of_politics/

Donald Trump is America's mad prophet: How he's ushering in a terrifying new age of politics

Trump's influence is finally becoming clear. While we laugh at his buffoonery, he's changing the rules of the game
Heather Digby Parton


We deal in illusions, man! None of it is true! But you people sit there, day after day, night after night, all ages, colors, creeds... We're all you know. You're beginning to believe the illusions we're spinning here. You're beginning to think that the tube is reality, and that your own lives are unreal. In God's name, you people are the real thing! *WE* are the illusion! — Howard Beale, "Network"


So far, this presidential cycle has been one for the books. The 1992 cycle featured a similar dynamic with a wealthy outsider running as a third party candidate and capturing the imagination of the press and the people alike. That race also featured generational change, petty sex scandals, an incumbent surprisingly in free-fall from a recent high of 90 percent approval and a right-wing nativist exciting a fairly large segment of the right wing over immigration. It was a roller coaster of a race in which the third party candidate, Ross Perot, of course, even dropped out after the Democratic convention, saying that the Democratic Party was "revitalized" and then joined up again a few months later.

And while the 2000 race was fairly predictably dull throughout, the aftermath was a doozy and the Sarah Palin addition to the 2008 GOP ticket didn't exactly usher in a staid political campaign of ideas. So, it's not fair to say that a weird presidential race is unprecedented,  but this one is undoubtedly one of the weirdest, at least on the Republican side.

We have had entertainers run for office before, Ronald Reagan being the most obvious example. But he had spent decades as an expressly political figure and had been Governor of California before venturing into presidential politics as a candidate; he ran as a serious ideological political leader of a movement and a party. Arnold Schwarzenegger was an international movie star who ran in a bizarre off year California recall election but he had long been associated with Republican politics, was married to a scion of the Kennedy family and had been mentioned as a candidate for Governor many times in the past. Sarah Palin was always more entertainer than politician, and she rapidly made the transition to reality TV star after quitting her job as Governor after two years. But Donald Trump is the first current TV star to run for president and actually run his campaign as a reality TV show. And this is something we really haven't seen before.

When a recent Rolling Stone profile of Trump was released, the press went wild with a couple of outrageous quotes, one about Fiorina's looks and another about how attractive he finds his daughter. These are creepy, off-color comments at best and ended up accruing to Fiorina's benefit in the CNN debate, where she deftly turned it back on him. But the article had another series of quotes the media didn't mention which show some intriguing insights into Trump's strategy:


"I thought I'd have spent $10 million on ads, when so far I've spent zero. I'm on TV so much, it'd be stupid to advertise. Besides, the shows are more effective than ads."

He's right, isn't he? Ads can have an effect.  But getting the chance to talk for hours at a time, uninterrupted, on all three networks is much more valuable.

He admits that you have to build a team on the ground and says he's got "huge, phenomenal" teams staffing up the first seven states. But he adds:


"I know that costs money, but I've got this, believe me. Remember: The two biggest costs in a presidential run are ads and transportation. Well, I own two planes and a Sikorsky chopper, so I'd say I'm pretty well covered there, wouldn't you?"

The article goes on to speculate just how much money Trump can really afford to spend and while it's surely enough, the question remains if he wants to spend it. His history suggests that one of the business lessons he's learned over the years is not to expose his own fortune to too much risk. So we'll see if he ever actually starts writing big checks. But it's his insight into the world of TV and how to manipulate it that's truly interesting.

I think there is probably a lot of handwringing going on behind the scenes at the news networks over their Trump coverage. Some serious journalists undoubtedly think it's insane to spend so much time covering his every bizarre utterance. But the people who look at the ratings obviously see something different. The first Republican debate drew 24 million viewers. The second drew 22 million.(This article from CNN Money explains that the drop off from the first is not because of less interest but because the debate was 3 hours long compared to 2.) Primary debates at this point in the 2011-2012 campaign cycle averaged 4 to 5 million viewers each. And nobody doubts that the reason people are tuning in to primary politics in such vast numbers so early in the cycle is because of one reason and one reason only: Donald Trump.

And as Michael Wolff wrote in this piece for the Hollywood Reporter, however he shakes out for the GOP, there's simply no doubt that Trump has brought big bucks to television this summer. But it's a mixed blessing for the network that created Republican TV:


[E]ven with such additional riches at Fox, the network suddenly finds itself in a deeply unsettled world. Trump is not one more product or reflection of the Fox News media philosophy and of its hold on the Republican party. Rather, Trump is the first Republican in the Fox age, who — in a weird sort of justice that liberal Fox haters might come to rue — threatens to break the network's hold on the Republican party and the discipline it has imposed on it. At best, Trump negotiates with Fox on an equal footing. Arguably, he dominates it, demanding it dance to his tune.

And dance to his tune they have done. We've never seen Roger Ailes so pliable before in the face of a Republican candidate who defies his power. But he has a big problem he's never had before. Wolff points out that up until now Fox has defined the GOP brand and maintained a strong hold on its identity but Trump may be breaking that dominance:


Disorientingly, Trump is as much the candidate of CNN as he is of Fox, as much a friend of CNN chief Jeff Zucker as he is of Fox's Sean Hannity or Bill O'Reilly, as much a golden goose for Zucker as for Ailes. Indeed, Zucker's star rises at CNN and within its parent Time Warner along with Trump's. It is, of course, Zucker who, while running NBC, commissioned The Apprentice and its offshoots, transforming Trump from a local New York personality to national phenomenon. (Piers Morgan, the former CNN host who regularly had Trump as one of his highest-rated guests, was a winner of Celebrity Apprentice.)

Interesting, no?

So Trump is playing Fox and CNN off of each other and getting so much free airtime in the process he has no need to run any ads. But with the ratings bonanza he's creating, these news networks have no complaints about that. It is a very mutually beneficial arrangement.

As Wolff says:


Trump is less like a traditional Republican candidate than he is like the missing Malaysian Airlines plane. He's the kind of news event that CNN has, in the Zucker era, become best at covering — the news event that can fill the vacuum of endless cable time, with no details too small, no rehash too repetitive. Such stories require no secret political and culture language. Rather, you just keep the camera trained on what's in front of you. Trump provides his own narrative and talking points.

In this, Trump, beyond politics, offers new hope for the news business.

At this stage of the electoral process the Donald Trump campaign is literally a live reality TV show that is being shown on several different networks at once, all of whom are making a bundle from it. And in the process, he is breaking down the system that's been dominating TV news for the past 20 years.

That may actually be good news, depending on how this all ends. The political media, particularly on TV, has largely been a disaster for decades now and it's not showing any sign of improvement. In fact, they seem to retreating to an earlier age, before Fox became dominant and the establishment press was obsessed by manufactured GOP scandals. Trump is doing something different and they have not yet fully caught on to what it is.

None of this means that Trump's not a real candidate, far from it. It may just mean that he's a new political paradigm, a celebrity politician who brings new found riches and power to the media conglomerates by being a dangerous highwire act from which nobody can look away.

Wolff notes that this may be the first time in a couple of decades that we have a candidate who breaks down the media silos and reaches into the general viewing population. He hypothesizes that with politics polarized and the most engaged citizens dividing more neatly within the two parties and squeezing the political audience into a much smaller universe than ever before, perhaps this represents a sort of new "center" of millions of people who are drawn in by the drama. As he writes, everyone's riveted to the show, asking each other:


"Will he self-destruct? And how? And who will he take with him? Or, even more astounding, will he go the distance and blow up everybody in his way? That's news. That's a story. That's television."

It is. And it's possible that going forward it's also politics, which is a much more scary proposition. For democracy to work, it requires at least a baseline level of rational understanding of what politics does. The Trump paradigm has no use for that.

This was foreseen by the brilliant screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky exactly 40 years ago in his classic film "Network." But even he didn't see the possibility that Howard Beale would actually be a very slick operator with tremendous fame and fortune who played the networks off of each other for ratings and profits. Maybe Trump really is the best deal-maker the world has ever known after all.

[Martinus]

Ok, after watching Trump on Colbert, I gotta say I like the guy much more. He seems to be good in front of a camera.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8P4m7EiQlSQ