Remember the conventional wisdom that Donald Trump was no more than a faddish celebrity candidate who would soon fade and drop out? Seems like another century, doesn’t it?

Ever since he announced, the billionaire businessman has been at the top of the polls and, with barely a ripple, has remained there. Right now he appears to be lapping the field and only three of his opponents — Ben Carson, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz — are even making it into double-digits on any of the polls. And Carson seems to be the one who is fading.

In the respected Reuters-IPSOS rolling poll from November 20, Trump is at 38.8%, Carson 14.7%, Rubio 10.3%, Cruz 7.1% with long ago supposed shoo-in frontrunner Jeb Bush 5.5%, trailing even “Wouldn’t Vote” (6.3%) by .8%.

No wonder, according to this weekend’s WSJ, the GOP “mainstream” is revving up to “hit Trump.” Panic has set in. From the WSJ: A super PAC supporting John Kasich (3.0% in the IPSOS poll) is apparently planning to blow $2.5 million on an anti-Trump campaign (talk about throwing good money after bad — how about giving it to cancer research, boys and girls?), Jeb is doubling down on his attacks, the Club for Growth is gearing up further assaults, and a “guerrilla campaign” is starting up by a new outfit called Trump Card LLC.

This last group, spearheaded by Liz Mair, at least has some originality to it. They’re producing parodies dramatizing Trump’s old not-so-conservative views (like supporting single-payer healthcare). But I would be willing to wager they will all amount to no more than the P-word: piffle. The Donald’s not going anywhere, and none of these initiatives seem remotely capable of dislodging him.

Meanwhile, Comrade Trotsky — as the events of the last few days have underscored, if we were too stupid not to know it — we’re at war. And in war, you don’t look to, say, Bernie Sanders to lead you. You look to George S. Patton. You’re not interested in nuance á la John Kerry, pathological dishonesty á la Hillary Clinton, or a president whose sympathy might really be for the other side. You want a real commander in chief, a fearless leader — you want…. Donald? Well, yes, Donald. He may have to do. He won’t be afraid to do what’s necessary.

Recognizing that, everyone, Republican and Democrat, is piling on. They jumped to vilify a Trump answer to a question from a sneaky NBC reporter about whether Donald thought we should keep a database of our Muslim population. Donald may or may not have said yes, and he already retracted it if he did, but that didn’t stop Jeb from characterizing his comment as “abhorrent.” It’s not even worth quoting what Hillary said (it wasn’t positive). Even Ted Cruz added, “I’m a big fan of Donald Trump’s, but not a fan of government registries of American citizens.”

Okay, that’s the polite, politically correct, way of looking at it. We all want to be “good people,” right? FDR must have been off his meds the day he rounded up all those Japanese and stuck them in internment camps.

But that’s far from the full story. Undoubtedly our government, even after Snowden, has all sorts of lists we don’t know about, organized in ways that would make us uncomfortable — some of them possibly saving our lives. The truth is PC doesn’t hack it in war. PC is a rich liberal’s plaything, a luxury item. It works best as a subject for ridicule on South Park. And it’s not the way we really think. It’s the way we pretend we think. So just who is it that is blowing innocent people to smithereens in Paris, Beirut, Sharm, and Mali, and who knows where else next? Zen Buddhist monks? The Little Sisters of the Poor?

Everybody knows who it is. Islam has a big problem and although people want to be polite or deliberately lie about it to look “good” to their neighbors or to their cousins at the Thanksgiving table, when they get into a voting booth, many of them are guiltily going to be pulling the lever for someone with the you-know-what to put an end to this global homicidal insanity — and it’s not going to be John Kasich or Rand Paul or Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders. It’s going to be Donald Trump. And if not Donald, possibly Marco Rubio or Ted Cruz, both of whom seem to be able to find Raqqa on a map. And none of these people are racists, not even faintly, no matter what some NBC reporter wants to imply.