Playground    

     I've considered various theories accounting for the success of Donald Trump as a presidential candidate.  Mine overlap with many I've heard mentioned by pundits and comedians, including a frequently cited one: Trump is really a Democrat--he entered the Republican presidential candidates field in order to undermine the Republican Party, like a sapper during a siege, digging under a tower to make it fall.
     He's certainly put the Party in turmoil as its members either resisted him or watched his antics and heard his outrages without meaningful comment.  Trump's vanquishing of the Republicans' "favorite son" establishment candidate, Jeb Bush, not only exposed the latter as a lightweight campaigner with an out of touch support structure, but also as a grown man subject to paralysis of the personality when faced with a dynamic, albeit odious, opponent.
     Trump's easy successes against a series of Republican challengers came mostly from his extensive use of insults.  "Little Marco," "Low Energy" Jeb Bush, and now he's saying "Crazy Bernie" and "Crooked Hillary."  This method of degradation, practiced extensively by children in school when I, and Trump, grew up, still apparently works on grown men.  Bush has not and most likely will not endorse Trump, but for the most part, Trump's former enemies "rally around the presumptive nominee," who, just this morning, reached the necessary delegate count: 1,237.
     If Trump really is a Democrat seeking to get Clinton elected by disrupting the Republican Party from within, he is now, without ambiguity, set firmly in the role of their standard bearer.  He's considered liberal by "true" Republican conservatives.  Trump's positions on any given subject jump around according to the meanderings of his mind.  He's a talker.  He makes pronouncements on everything he mentions without ever offering evidence.  His certainty several days ago that the Egyptair airliner disaster over the Mediterranean was the result of terrorism was stated with absolute conviction, based on no evidence other than "gut instinct," the kind of non-intellectual stance preferred by people like George W. Bush and Bill O'Reilly.  The Egyptair tragedy may have been the result of a terror plot, but for one of the two presidential possibilities of 2016 to insist, without any evidence to offer other than his own feeling (which we know by now has a hair trigger), puts him in the same league as drunks talking politics in bars at one in the morning.
     His dumb-American-guy "He talks like us" appeal does suggest what he really is: a lout with a lot of money.  His personality, having grown from that of a more thoughtful and softer-speaking real estate celebrity in the 1980s, has been transformed through reality television into a persona that began to get particularly political in 2011, the year before the Obama-Romney competition, when Trump became the premier Birther, advocating the idea (which has no basis in fact), that Obama is not an American citizen.  He worked that idea well into 2012, but now doesn't "want to talk about it."  The illogical notion served its purpose a few years ago, got Trump firmly into the racist hearts of the so-called "Silent Majority," a mass of white Americans, middle and working class, feeling their imagined rule of this country slipping in favor of darker-skinned people.  Hence, Trump started his campaign last June by attacking Mexican "criminals and rapists" coming across the border, a sure way to stimulate the hatred that largely fuels his reprehensible campaign.
     The overwhelming truth of Trump's rise to power in politics is not a matter of a wily secret Democrat trying to help Hillary Clinton get elected.  Trump himself is the secret ingredient.  His desire to magnify his sense of greatness dominates everything he does and says.  He's a blowhard that can't be convinced to leave the soiree.  Some find him entertaining, but that's a dubious recommendation for someone trying to be president.
     Trump is now his party's nominee.  His opponent, Hillary Clinton, is nearly as unpopular nationwide as he is.  The election, in spite of Trump's alienation of women, Latinos, and African-Americans, could go either way.  Americans voted for Richard Nixon twice.  Americans voted for George W. Bush twice.  Americans, some of them, believed Sarah Palin could be a serious vice president, and could take over as president if elderly John McCain were to die in office.  Millions of Americans believed in the possibility of and accepted the reality of, without thinking it absurd, the words President Palin.  The same Sarah Palin who now supports Donald Trump, just as Chris Christie, Marco Rubio, and a majority of the Republican Party do.
     The rush that Trump must get from all the support, seeing how he's won over Republican skeptics, is some of the fuel that flies his missile, and now donors prepare to give money to his campaign to defeat Clinton.
     Giving money to help a billionaire, unless one is in a position in society to seek real control, is a very stupid thing to do, but I suspect that poor and working class "Silent Majority" victims of Trump's propaganda will make their small contributions, thinking they're doing their part to make American great again, when really all they're doing is help grow a ball of phlegm the nation would be wise to expectorate.

                                                                               Vic Neptune