Mouth Agape So it’s Trump. Wow. Just how batshit crazy are the Republicans? Well, their 17 candidates were a pretty crazy slate to begin with. Another Bush? Sure, why not. Just because the first one was a nonentity voted out after one term and the next was a disaster of economic destruction and illegal war, that doesn’t mean the next one won’t be the good one. “Oops” Perry, “Can’t-Google-Him” Santorum, “Pyramids” Carson, “College-Boy-Ignorance” Paul, “Lucifer” Cruz . . . name one of the candidates for the Republican nomination that wasn’t, at best, a hold-your-nose-and-choose choice. I never thought he’d last past the initial paperwork filing, let alone go the distance. Even though, as of today, it’s still possible the convention could be contested, it’s increasingly unlikely. At this point, all the candidates who haven’t actually withdrawn can still keep garnering delegates and deny Trump the outright majority he needs, but it’s more likely that GOP voters will shrug and pull the lever for The Donald, and he’ll roll into Cleveland unopposed. I never thought enough people could be that stupid, but forgot just how easy it can be for hucksters – political or not – to run their cons. And regardless of how serious Trump takes himself and how gullibly the public takes up his policy proposals, they are cons. Mexico isn’t going to pay for Trump’s wall and he isn’t going to build one. A Republican majority in the House and Senate will present a bill to repeal Obamacare and he will sign it, but the disaster of health care that will precipitate will quickly cause such damage to the economy that the US has only the comfort of knowing Trump’s Presidency will be one-term-only. I certainly thought the Republican Party would pull out all the stops to put an end to his candidacy, but that presumed that they hadn’t created this golum to begin with, which they did, pandering to all the worst impulses of their base. There is some media complicity in Trump’s success. They gave him a lot of free air time. Why not? It was considered endlessly entertaining for such a buffoon to be showing up the mainstream candidates, let alone the behaviour of the buffoons among his supporters (is that all of them? Or only most?). So the only question left is: Does Trump stand a chance against the Democrats in the general election? Everybody said he didn’t stand a chance to go this far, at every stage of the campaign. Everybody says he’ll lose to Clinton or to Sanders in November, and they’ve been saying it, louder and louder, at every stage of the campaign. They say the Electoral College math won’t add up his way, but that’s on the basis that everything’s pretty much the same as it’s been these last few Presidential elections. Trump’s success suggests it may not be so simple anymore. We have to hope the people Trump has marginalised come out strong and the people he frightens – Republicans as well as Democrats and independents or swing voters – do, too, along with the committed Democrats, or we’ll see what happens when America is forced to accept the Trump branding. It won’t be pretty.