The Republican clown car officially has its top ten candidates selected for the first Presidential debate of the 2016 election cycle and the nation will soon be given a glimpse of the comedy that will be the Republican primary. We don't know what softball questions Fox "News" will send each candidates way, but we do know the evening will be memorable simply because of the man who will be standing at center stage. The man, the myth, the living legend. Donald J Trump.
Trump, who is currently leading the pack with 26 percent of self-identified Republican primary voters backing him, will be front and center and we can only assume that he will make the most of his newfound Republican fame. He will be flanked by Jeb Bush and Scott Walker. Mike Huckabee, Ben Carson, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Rand Paul, Chris Christie, and John Kasich make up the remainder of the ten candidates who will be sharing the stage with the larger than life character that is "The Donald."
It is the height of irony that the party who insists they want to appeal to mainstream America is smitten a candidate who is the exact antithesis of everything their "autopsy" proposed. Instead of heeding their leaders advice to become more mainstream, the Republican base has fallen in love with a man who calls undocumented workers "rapists" and says that he will build a "great wall" along out entire southern border to keep them out.
I almost feel bad for the Republicans who are taking this nominating process seriously, but those feeling dissipate quickly when I remind myself that Trump is only saying the things that the Republican base genuinely believes. It should be of no surprise that, after seven years of berating President Obama and foretelling the pending demise of "America as we know it" that the base actually starts believing that nonsense.
Donald Trump isn't the fringe of the Republican Party; he is the Republican Party.