The Guardian view on Donald Trump: only one way to stop him now
It is important to understand how a man with a vast portfolio of private homes, including a three-storey penthouse, decorated in the manner of the palace of Versailles, in New York, a vast Citizen Kane-like estate in Florida and about 40 other apartments and mansions all across America, has successfully forged an apparently rock-solid bond with white Republicans, many of them direct or indirect victims of the housing finance crisis that triggered the 2007-8 crash.
At its core is a mix of at least three things.
The first is the potency of Trump’s confrontational racial politics, against which the Republican party is peculiarly badly armed because of its own recent history, exemplified among many things by its attitude to Mr Obama.
The second is the more than 50-year preoccupation of parts of the party, dating from the Barry Goldwater campaign of 1964 to the present day, with turning it into the vehicle of the conservative religious and cultural movement, a process of which Mr Cruz was merely one of the latest and one of the more inflexible advocates, which has made anger its stock-in-trade.
And a third, not fully acknowledged, is the media-driven agenda of the celebrity era.
A mesmerised media, as one writer put it this week, has gorged on the Trump story and has failed to subject his candidacy to the critical interrogation that it has spent decades applying, to take a topical example, to Hillary Clinton.
Why so?
“The money’s rolling in and this is fun,” is how the head of CBS has put it.
“It’s a terrible thing to say,” he continued, “But, bring it on, Donald. Keep going.” And Donald keeps going.
Not a word about the increasingly widespread conviction that decades of free trade have sent America's best jobs overseas and replaced them with nothing remotely comparable.
Not a word about the abundantly obvious, centuries long orthodoxy that massive immigration, especially in a weak economy, radically drives down wages.
Not a word about the glaring anti-white racism allied with elite economic interests and the demographic needs of the Democratic Party that drive both free trade and elite refusal to police the borders.
Bernie Sanders opened his run campaigning against both high immigration and free trade.
The bosses at The New York Times read him the riot act, explaining Democrats cannot possibly win presidential elections without a massive Hispanic vote and anyway his anti-immigration views were already putting him on the wrong side of the unanimous race-baiting propaganda of the entire American left, and the message got through.
Bernie shut up about immigration and, after a shaky start, got religion on the whole #BLM thing, but he would not back away from the trade issue on which his position, as well as his relatively peacenik positions in foreign policy, clearly aligns him with the Buchananism of Trump.
Want to guess why so many Bernie supporters say, to the shock of the clueless media folks, that if Hillary is the Democratic nominee they will support Il Duce?
You mean you really don't get it?
No, he's not the John Galt of tea-bagger, Randian libertarian fantasy, a kind of free-enterprise Mussolini, a Dark Lord of capitalist self-infatuation here to take down a government totally corrupted by mobs of looters.
But he's the Duce that actually showed up.
Trump could be president.
After long trailing behind Hillary Clinton in the opinion polls, Trump finally edged ahead of her in a Rasmussen Reports survey on Monday.
Support had shifted from 41-36 in Clinton’s favour in March to 41-39 in Trump’s favour now.
The much-trumpeted assumption that the Trump brand has too many “negatives” to be electable, especially among women, no long looks the case.
With the nomination under his belt, Trump’s defeat by Clinton is no foregone conclusion.
He could yet be the Leicester City of American politics.
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