Illustration by TOM BACHTELL

The Presidential candidacy as joke is a perennial sideshow along the raucous midway of the American political carnival. Sometimes the candidate—Will Rogers (1928), Gracie Allen (1940), Pat Paulsen (1968 through 1996), Stephen Colbert (2008)—is a fully qualified professional humorist. Sometimes he, or it, is an animal, barnyard (Pigasus, the Yippie mascot, 1968) or cartoon (Pogo, the comic-strip possum, 1952). Sometimes—like Lar Daly, the Chicago eccentric who, in 1956 and three times thereafter, campaigned in an Uncle Sam suit—he appears to be in on the joke. Sometimes he doesn’t. The first two or three times that Harold Stassen, a talented progressive who at age thirty-one had been elected governor of Minnesota, sought the Republican nomination, his candidacy was taken seriously, and rightly so. By the fifth or sixth time, he was a punch line. By the ninth—in 1992, when he was eighty-five—the poignancy of it all muted the laughter.

The joke candidate of the present moment partakes of many of the qualities of those who have gone before, but the precursor he most strikingly resembles, perhaps, is the late Bishop Homer A. Tomlinson. Like Bishop Tomlinson, the 1952, 1960, 1964, and 1968 Presidential nominee of the Theocratic Party, Donald Trump is a repeat aspirant, having previously proclaimed his readiness to occupy the nation’s highest office in 1988 and 2000. Tomlinson lived in a little frame house in Queens; Trump grew up in a big house (some two dozen rooms, twenty-foot Georgian columns on the portico) in the same borough of New York. Like Trump, Tomlinson had a business background: before joining the pastorate, he was C.E.O. of his own advertising agency. Like the Bishop, the Donald is a person of faith. Tomlinson was top man in a spinoff of the Church of God, part of the Pentecostal movement. Trump is a Christian, too. “I think that the Bible certainly is—it is the book,” Trump told an interviewer for the Christian Broadcasting Network recently. “I’m a Presbyterian. And you know, I’ve had a good relationship with the church over the years.” But the decisive similarity is a level of megalomania unusual even in people who consider themselves entitled to supreme power. Between elections, Bishop Tomlinson travelled the world with a portable throne, crowning himself, among other things, King of Belgium, King of Ethiopia, Tsar of Russia, and, finally, King of the World. Trump thinks no less highly of himself.

Tomlinson’s delusions were harmless, and not widely shared. Not so Trump’s. In the weeks since his proto-campaign began, Trump has talked of many things. Of energy policy, for example: “We need to seize Iraq’s oil fields.” Of China: “Our enemies.” Of abortion rights: “I’m pro-life.” (He used to be pro-choice, but, as one of his top aides noted the other day, “people change their positions all the time, the way they change their wives.”) Of health policy: “I will fight to end Obamacare.” (He used to be for a universal single-payer system, but that was then.) Of taxes: “It’s part of my speech. No new taxes.” The main thing he has talked of, though, is President Obama’s birthplace. The President was born on August 4, 1961, at the Kapi‘olani Medical Center, in Honolulu, Hawaii. Trump, however, believes—or says he believes—that it might have happened elsewhere. Africa, maybe.

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The Donald Trump birther tour took wing on March 17th, via an interview with ABC’s Ashleigh Banfield, taped aboard his private Boeing 727. “The reason I have a little doubt, just a little, is because he grew up and nobody knew him,” Trump said. “The whole thing is very strange.” “You mock me,” he told Joe Scarborough, of MSNBC, on April 1st, adding, wildly, “but his own grandmother says he was born in Kenya and says she was there.” By April 7th, “a little doubt” on ABC had become “a big possibility” on NBC. After two more weeks of this sort of thing, Trump published an op-ed piece in the April 20th USA Today. “Sadly,” he wrote—five sentences after demanding that Obama “provide his birth certificate for forensic review”—“the press has en masse chosen to glom onto but one of the myriad issues I have discussed and would tackle as President. . . . I have spoken my piece on this issue.” Time to move on? Uh, no. The next morning, on CNN, Trump boasted, as he had before, that his own private investigators are on the case, and that “at a certain point in time” he “will be revealing some interesting things.” The interviewer, Ali Velshi, urged him to admit that Obama was in fact born where he was born. “It’s possible that he was, but there’s a big question as to whether or not he was,” Trump replied. “When I started, two months ago, I thought he was. Every day that goes by, I think less and less that he was born in the United States.”

For Trump, thinking less and less seems to be working more and more from week to week—or so the opinion polls, which didn’t start asking Republican voters about him until a couple of months ago, suggest. In a February Newsweek/Daily Beast poll, he came in fourth. Early in April, an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll had him in second place, tied with Mike Huckabee, behind Mitt Romney. By midmonth, both Gallup and CNN had him in a tie with Huckabee for the top spot. And in at least one other poll—by a firm whose client list leans Democratic, to be sure—Trump is No. 1.

No wonder. According to the latest CBS News/New York Times poll, only a third of the Republican rank and file believe that Barack Obama is, in the Constitution’s phrase, a “natural born Citizen”—and therefore eligible to be President of the United States. Few of their party’s national leaders have embraced the opposite view as fervently as Trump has. Most of them have duly stated that the President is an American. But their demurrals too often come wrapped in equivocation. They say they think he was born here. Or they say they take him at his word. Or they warn that “the issue”—which is no issue at all, not in the sense of being a matter of opinion rather than a matter of fact—is a distraction from more important problems.

The dismaying truth is that birtherism is part of a larger pattern of rejection of reality that has taken hold of intimidating segments of one of the two political parties that alternate in power in our governing institutions. It is akin to the view that global warming is a hoax, or that the budget can be balanced through spending cuts alone, or that contraception causes abortion, or that evolution is just another theory, on a par with the theory that the earth is six thousand years old. Or, for that matter, that Bishop Tomlinson was ever King of the World. “The world laughs at us,” Donald Trump said the other day. “They won’t be laughing if I’m elected President.” That they won’t; anyway, he won’t be. But they are laughing now. As is well known, gallows humor is an excellent way to keep from crying. ♦