…and of course by ‘candidates’, I mean the Donald. Yes, step right up and witness the birth pangs of Trump’s four month main drag to November 8th. D-Day. Electo-Fest 2016. The How-Did-They-Let-It-Get-This-Far finale for the rest of the world.

As I summed up in the most recent post, the last year has been a rollercoaster ride for those with even a passing interest in American presidential politics. Albeit, it’s the kind of rollercoaster ride that starts as many thrill rides do: that wonderful stomach-churning drop at the top of a long climb; that adrenalin surge as you free fall, attached to a trustworthy track with steel and rope. At this stage though, deep in the lower colon of 2016, we’re beginning to wonder if this free fall is going to stop. The same analogy could be clumsily thrown at the situation if Trump wins in November.

Fear not. This ride seems to be levelling out. Since the conventions, the Donald has been on a free fall of his own. Although, it would be arrogant to assume whether he knows it. His people certainly do, as they scurry to the Twittosphere and in front of prime time cameras to ‘correct the narrative’ whenever their hapless lord unwittingly spews forth his latest ‘thought’ into a microphone. “That microphone was planted their by the liberal media! Audio technology has a well known liberal bias!” “You’ve misunderstood the context of his point!” Just over two weeks after the RNC and the DNC have wrapped on their quadrennial Mega Church affair, and the D is beginning to resemble that reveller at a party that’s had far too much to drink, a little bit to smoke and is now trying to pass themselves off as composed, in quiet conversation with a picture of your Dad on the mantel piece. The grim but genius finality to this image is when he laughs at a framed picture’s joke, thinking that they too agree that the immigrants took those jobs, and a good metric cup of vomit bursts forth. He never knew he had it in him, but he will be damned if he doesn’t spend the next 20 minutes trying to mop it off the picture’s glass. He’s not sorry though. He’s not politically correct.

***

Indeed, all seemed well in the wake of the RNC. The Republicans had swallowed their medicine and locked step behind their new God Emperor. Big players on the DC scene tipped the hat and kissed the ring, albeit with some gritted teeth. Now GOP Chairman Reince Priebus had to open the war chest and guide the highly volatile ship that was the Trump Campaign to somewhere stable. There was hope for the GOP establishment given that in mid-June 2016, just before the RNC went to post in Cleveland, Trump fired his highly volatile and highly suspect Campaign Manager Corey Lewandowski. After all, Lewandowski proved even too much for the MAGA trail. On two separate occasions he had been accused of physically assaulting people at Trump rallies. A reporter for Breitbart News (itself a bastion of anti-PC policy), Michelle Fields even had a battery charge brought against him for which he had to turn himself in to the authorities.

The sacking of this loose cannon may have been an attempt to distance Trump from an even looser primary pastiche. Lewandowski had a concrete history working for ‘Americans for Prosperity’ from 2008 until January 2015. If you remember, this group was the flagship enterprise through which the Koch Brothers plied their Astroturfing game across the disenfranchised voters that looked to the Tea Party. Corey was instrumental in North Eastern support for Tea Party candidates, and so, who better to ramp up Trump’s campaign? Who better to pick the bones of the disenfranchised?

But he was gone. The establishment of the GOP saw a new light as they rallied around their king. Time to get serious. Time to get Real on a soft America.

It didn’t last long.

Lewandowski’s replacement, Jason Miller, a former Communications Advisor for Sen. Ted Cruz’s bid for the nomination, was caught slamming Trump across a series of Tweets from as early as April. While bashing one’s opponent is completely natural in the shit storm of American politics, hiring said basher is just a rookie move for a freshly minted national campaign.

Evidently, Mr Miller is not the best when it comes to advising his candidate of how best to conduct himself when faced with a tackle covered in fresh delicious bait. As we all know by now, the DNC wheeled out the Ghazala and Khizir Khan, the Gold Star parents of a slain Muslim American soldier. They called into question Trumps capability on a number of fronts. It was the perfect bait. They raised issues around Trumps Islamophobic rhetoric, around his position on those all important Troops, and by proxy, it hit his foreign policy record, or lack thereof. It was a cynical move by the Democrats, no doubt, but let’s not be too naive about the wheelhouse we’re playing in. The Democrats had already near Watergated their own convention with the financing leaks and the resignation of Chairperson Wasserman-Schultz.

Nevertheless, God Emperor and Trump couldn’t resist lashing back with some loaded and backward comments. To the New York Times he opined, “I’d like to hear his (Khan’s) wife say something.” Implying of course that Khan had lashed Ghazala with Sharia law tropes, handicapping her from speech. Wait. Did I say implying? “If you look at his wife, she was standing there… She had nothing to say. She probably, maybe she wasn’t allowed to have anything to say. You tell me.”

Yes, with the rhetorical cadence of a typewriter getting tuned up by a cinder block, Trump went full gormless. He took the Democrats bait, swallowed it and didn’t even realise he’s given himself political food poisoning. Sen. John McCain, among others, even expressed disgust at Trumps remarks. Subsequently, McCain’s office experienced a storm of concerned veterans demanding that the Senator remove his endorsement of Trump.

The weeks got worse. At a rally in Virginia on August 2, Trump used his podium to address the issue of a crying baby in the audience. “I love babies. I hear that baby cry, I like it,” he said. “What a baby. What a beautiful baby. Don’t worry, don’t worry. The mom’s running around, like, don’t worry about it, you know. It’s young and beautiful and healthy, and that’s what we want.” After a few more minutes of crying, Trump un-PC’d all over that shit. “Actually I was only kidding, you can get the baby out of here. I think she really believed me that I love having a baby crying while I’m speaking. That’s okay. People don’t understand. That’s okay.”

The staggering ineptitude of this candidate is fascinating. His army of Centipedes across the internet had to race to his defense, once again claiming that the Media has distorted what he was actually saying. No, you’ve misinterpreted his ass-banditry! Such a world it is when Politifact.com runs an article illustrating that Trump “accurately says media wrong that he kicked baby out of rally”, he just said some ignorant shit that would get your uncle kicked out of the house at Sunday lunch.

Not long after this, the George W. Bush administration officially announced its support of Hillary Clinton for President. This was preceded by the Harvard Republican Club, the oldest in America, refusing to endorse their Party’s candidate for the first time in 128 years. And yet the campaign’s worst nightmare has only arrived.

On the week of July 25, RealClearPolitics.com, a polling aggregator, had Trump nationally ahead, 45.7 points to Hillary’s 44.6. Then Khan spoke, but more importantly, Trump reacted. By July 31, Trump had dropped to 43.4. Astonishingly though, Hillary had actually lost 0.1 points at this stage, according to RCP. The day after the Virginia baby fiasco, Hillary cruised up to 47.3, while the Donald sank lower to 41.6. The ‘High Energy’ traction that Trump’s online Nimble Navigators prided themselves and their Emperor on was certainly waning. This slide continued as Trump unveiled an immensely contradictory economic plan on August 7. Sunday’s hour-plus address at the Detroit Economic Club is seen as a rite of passage for candidates, but in it Trump laid out a plan that not only completely flip-flopped on his working-class-first campaign origins, but raised taxes on most American brackets, while giving an $800,000 break to the top half of the top one percent.

While this slip continued, even leveling at one point, August 9 2016 may go down as the day Trump put the nail in his campaign’s coffin. At a campaign rally in Wilmington, North Carolina on Tuesday, Trump seems to have insinuated that gun owners could attempt an assassination on either Hillary or her Supreme Court nominations:

“Hillary wants to abolish, essentially abolish the Second Amendment. By the way, if she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do folks. Though the Second Amendment people, maybe there is, I don’t know…”

The wire is officially on fire and the House of Trump is beginning to smoulder. His Nimble Navigators are rushing to claim that it was merely a call to metaphorical arms; for second amendment gun owners to rally together and get out the vote to stop ‘Crooked Hillary’. This being a spin that even Trump’s own campaign missed as they decided to spin it as a joke that the PC brigade didn’t or couldn’t get. It wasn’t until 3.21am this morning that Communication Advisor Miller got the spin out there as Trump tweeted about harnessing the influence of gun-rights activists.

Media desperate to distract from Clinton's anti-2A stance. I said pro-2A citizens must organize and get out vote to save our Constitution! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 10, 2016

If this was the case, and he was appealing to the 2A and NRA base, then it is just another rookie move etched into his already riddled political career. Why would the chosen Republican nominee waste time so badly with a far-right demographic that is already in the pocket of the GOP’s polling numbers? Why not court the female vote, a vote where the candidate is catastrophically dragging. What about 18-25? A demographic where numbers have slipped so poorly in recent weeks that he would do well to throw them a few rhetorical bones. After all, it is the most recently tapped demographic, with the Obama campaign unlocking this notoriously apathetic political market back in 2007/08.

In the case that this was a joke, then it’s a pretty dangerous one to play with. For a lot of voters, this is where they draw the line. They may have given a pass to all the Donald’s previous gaffes, but his off the cuff, un-PC nature is beginning to reveal itself to be the thoughtlessly thoughtless rambling of a withered, oral klutz. At what point will his defenders realise that they are no longer campaigning; they are explaining, spinning, defending. Factors of a campaign, no doubt, but when there is nothing left to praise, you’re essentially doing the political equivalent of going door to door in a new neighbourhood, letting the public know that you’re a registered sex offender.

Joke or not, former head of the CIA, retired Gen. Michael Hayden best summed up this oddity when he told CNN that, “If someone else had said that said outside the hall, he’d be in the back of a police wagon now with the Secret Service questioning him.” Moreover, Hayden poetically shut down any debate on the syntactic ambiguity of Trump’s statements when he commented, “You’re not just responsible for what you say. You are responsible for what people hear.” And as everyone but America knows, when it comes to gun-rights activists, such a statement could not be more painfully true.

***

While initially Donald Trump went up and down the polls like a High School dropout that’s just waiting for their big break, it looks like Trump’s days of dancing are coming to a grim and predictable end. And no, there was never going to be a modelling contract. After these latest missteps (to put it mildly), Hillary has soared to a +7.9 lead, sitting pretty, with her excitable soon-to-be First Husband, at 47.8. Meanwhile, Trump has slumped to 39.9.

It’s always easy to pass judgement on the young and naive stripper that’s just doing this to pay the bills until something else comes along. It’s a stereotype well versed in modern media. Yet just like the pimps and jackals that frequent the skin bars jammed with these crushed dreams, we love it really – hypocrisy and all. Poised in front of our news streams and polling data; wrapped up in the warm glow of imagery – feeding the Beast. Trump was always going to be a Hindenburg; a tragicomedy on an epic scale – a King Lear without redemption or death, just wandering in that forest, dangerously mumbling to himself.

And yet, some people and the Fools followed.

J. O’Brien