Martin Dyckman: Does Donald Trump rising portend GOP fall?

There hasn’t been a presidential candidate as fat-headed, obnoxious and unqualified as Donald Trump. Yet more Republicans seem to favor him than any of the others. That says as much about them as about him.

H. L. Mencken, who coined the term “booboisie” for voters with similar tastes, had an explanation for such phenomena.

“I enjoy democracy immensely,” he wrote in 1926. “It is incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing. Does it exalt dunderheads,
cowards, trimmers, frauds, cads? Then the pain of seeing them go up is balanced and obliterated by the joy of seeing them come down.”

But what if Trump doesn’t come down, as so many think wishfully that he will? The latest CNN poll still shows him leading among Republican voters nationwide, and his numbers seem to go up, not down, the more he shoots his mouth off.

Another way to read that particular poll is that more than eight of 10 Republican voters presently prefer one of the others, with Jeb Bush and Scott Walker next in line. But nearly half of those presumably more sensible voters also say they want Trump to stay in the race. Clearly, he’s exciting the “base” as none of the others can. He’s playing to the crowd the same way the Caesars did at the Coliseum.

The desperate hope of party elders is that the base will eventually coalesce around one of the others, someone who wouldn’t gross out moderate voters as much as Trump does.

But what if that doesn’t happen? Many of their midseason and late primaries, including Florida’s and North Carolina’s, will be winner-take all. That favors Trump’s appeal to the mob. His money could keep him in the running all the way to the nominating convention in Cleveland next July, where the grown-ups would have to weigh one travesty against another: Trump as running mate or as an independent candidate splintering their base in November?

Meanwhile, he’s sucking up the attention and discouraging the money needed by so many other candidates not named Bush.

This is hugely entertaining and encouraging to the Democrats. Their primaries are all proportional, which discourages rogue candidates.

The Republicans have themselves to blame. As E.J. Dionne wrote in The Washington Post last week, “the party created the rough beast it is now trying to slay.”

He was referring to how candidates had once crawled on their knees to Trump for his money and blessings.

But it goes even deeper than that.

“Trump,” writes Timothy Egan in The New York Times, “is a byproduct of all the toxic elements Republicans have thrown into their brew over the last decade or so — from birtherism to race-based hatred of immigrants, from nihilists who shut down government to elected officials who shout “You lie!” at their commander in chief.”

How does Trump, a rich kid who cowered behind deferments during Vietnam, get away with insulting a hero like John McCain?

“Simple,” Egan says. “The party he now wants to represent wrote the playbook on it.”

Like almost everyone else except Ted Cruz, Bush expressed shock at Trump’s vile put-down of McCain and other veterans who endured captivity.

But where was Bush, or any other “respectable” Republican, when the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth were mocking John Kerry’s heroic military record to help re-elect his elder brother George in 2004?

Jeb’s silence spoke volumes. After the election, he wrote a letter of praise to the Swift Boat leader and still defends it.

“Now, the only way to trump Trump is to act like a fool in public,” Egan says.

But Trump only plays the fool. His smear of McCain was red meat intentionally tossed to Republican yahoos like those in Arizona who don’t think their senator is conservative enough.

In taking ownership of the birther canard, he was playing to the racists who despise President Obama most of all because he’s black.

Trashing Mexico and its people exploits a virulent strain of bigotry that has infected this country ever since the Know Nothings targeted Irish Catholics and other immigrants in the 1850s. It’s also calculated to hit Bush where he’s weakest with the Tea Party and other haters on the Republican far right. With them, Bush’s humane side is a liability.

In opting for a winner-take all primary, the Republican Party of Florida figures on giving a big boost to either Bush or Marco Rubio. A recent poll indicates that Bush could take it all. But March 15 is still far off and late enough in the schedule for as many as a dozen others to have folded their cards. Who picks them up? Trump? The party ought to reconsider winner-take-all while there’s still time.

The most electable Republican in the race is John Kasich of Ohio, a thoughtful governor who couldn’t and wouldn’t stoop to Trump’s gutter-level theatrics. But what hope is there for such a man to be nominated when more than half of his party is delighted to have a clown running the circus?

Martin Dyckman is a retired associate editor of the St. Petersburg Times. He lives in Western North Carolina. Column courtesy of Context Florida.