Donald Trump is not a pleasant man. He is egotistical, vain, bombastic, often mean-spirited. He revels in his financial superiority, which he conflates with human goodness. When he contorts his mouth into a kind of tube as he talks, you brace yourself for something outrageous—and it nearly always emerges as expected. His likability quotient, at least in terms of his public persona, is down somewhere in single digits.
And yet he has just taken hold of the American political system by the neck and doesn’t seem inclined to let go anytime soon. The political elites don’t know what to do or say about his sudden rise in the polls. The elite media default to their favorite hobby horse of political analysis—that any backlash to the current wave of immigration will simply destroy the Republican Party earlier than it would otherwise be destroyed, which is inevitable anyway so why bother?
The latest poll [4], by The Economist and YouGov, has Trump leading the field of GOP presidential candidates with 15 percent, four percentage points ahead of former Florida governor Jeb Bush.Though the YouGov polling methodology is sometimes criticized, this result matches other polls, including a recent North Carolina survey that has Trump at 16 percent, again four percentage points ahead of Bush. There is widespread speculation that Trump ultimately will initiate an independent presidential candidacy and shake up the country’s politics in the general election.
So here we have a hard-working, conventional Republican candidate in Jeb Bush, who has amassed a strong record as a serious politician over many years and has the benefit of a hallowed political name. And suddenly he finds himself second fiddle to an upstart industrialist with an acid tongue, no political record, and a penchant for offensive remarks.
What’s going on here?
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