Donald Trump is far ahead in the new Washington Post poll of the Republican presidential primary.
Think about this: One in four Republican voters actually favors at the moment this clown prince for president of these United States.
That is approximately equal parts sad and funny.
It reflects a Republican Party that has trivialized itself with superficiality and extremism and now had its self-caricature exposed by a Kardashian-caliber thinker and poser.
But something most interesting occurred in that poll.
It was conducted over four days. The first three days came before Trump disrespected the torture endured as a prisoner of war by John McCain.
Trump was polling at 28 percent through those three days. The final round of surveying came the day after Trump’s scoffing at McCain’s supposed heroism. On that day, Trump polled only in single digits, dragging his four-day aggregate from 28 points to 24.
So he may have really stepped in it. Well, wallowed in it. He was waist-deep already, and getting stronger with the robust irrational Republican element as he waded deeper.
That’s until, perhaps, this episode, one that got him denounced by nearly every prominent Republican except Ted Cruz, who is pitifully trying to position himself as the guy who becomes Trump if Trump goes away.
Here are the numbers: Trump leads at 24 percent with Scott Walker, the Koch brothers-backed governor of Wisconsin who talked Monday of starting a war with Iran on his first day as president, second at 13 percent.
Jeb Bush, the heavily financed but alarmingly weak favorite, came next at 12 percent. Everyone else in the absurdly massive field is bunched below, but Our Boy Mike Huckabee leads the rest with 8 percent.
The first Republican debate next month in Cleveland will pit the top 10 finishers in an aggregation of recent polling. So it looks like Huckabee is in, guaranteeing the glib and the quip.
Actually, Huckabee, not Cruz, might be best positioned to emerge as Trump-Lite if Trump fades. That’s because the appeal is a matter of media-savvy superficiality and irresponsibility. The appeal is grounded in vacuity. Huckabee’s bass guitar-playing and golden-throated Faubus-isms and Wallace-isms could very well fit that bill.
We know the Iowa Republican caucuses are non-serious affairs, by virtue of Huckabee’s having won them in 2008.
What Huckabee’s victory in Iowa exposed in 2008—the weakness of McCain and Mitt Romney and the Republican arsenal itself—is a more glaringly exposed storyline in this Trump phenomenon, which seems almost an inevitable progression.
Trump may or may not represent the bottoming-out of the Republican trivialization. That may await 2020 with the Hillary-challenging candidacy of Tom Cotton.
This time the Republican establishment has put a hundred million dollars into the blandness and perceived electability of Jeb Bush. Until the weekend assault on McCain, it had tried to apply kid gloves to Trump to avoid offending the irrational base and irking the unpredictable and egomaniacal Trump into mounting an independent candidacy, which would accomplish one thing, a landslide victory, rather than a mere one, for Hillary Clinton.
Last weekend someone asked Trump to take the possibility of such an independent run off the table. He said he couldn’t do that.
As an independent candidate suffering the self-inflicted wound of the McCain comment, Trump might get only 3 to 4 percent. But that would be 3 to 4 percent coming straight off the Republican nominee. And that would be 3 to 4 percent that couldn’t be spared in Ohio or Pennsylvania or Florida or Virginia or Colorado.
Ask Al Gore what a third-party candidacy from your irrational philosophical base can do to you.
In 2000, Ralph Nader ran for president for the Green Party and got 2.74 percent. After all the litigating was done in and about Florida, Gore was declared the loser of that decisive state by a margin smaller than the votes presumably taken from him by Nader.
Finally, we should mention that the Washington Post also polled the Democratic presidential race, such as it is.
Hillary Clinton came in at 68 percent and Bernie Sanders 16.
It’s closer than that in Iowa and perhaps New Hampshire as well. So we may still experience a pro-Bernie, anti-Hillary boomlet.
But I’m still thinking that, for all the noise, establishment credibility and money will prevail and we’ll confront another Clinton-Bush choice.
I’m going to say it’ll be Clinton-somebody versus Bush-John Kasich versus Trump-Jenner.
John Brummett’s column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at [email protected]. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.