Ending the Trump nightmare

Maybe, just maybe, Donald Trump’s candidacy for president is less real then many of us suppose.

This is wishful thinking, but maybe the GOP frontrunner for president doesn’t actually believe Mexico is exporting its rapists to America.

{mosads}And maybe his beyond-the-pale remarks on banning Muslims from America are set up as merely the latest in a series of unspoken dares to see how far he needs to go to wake up the American electorate.

If this were to be the case, now, with the Iowa caucuses in sight, would be a great time for Trump to end the charade, tell us all it was a big ruse, and have the last laugh. Joke’s on us, right?

By now, surely, anybody who said last summer that his run for the White House was a mere self-aggrandizing Trump-sized publicity stunt would have to reckon that what we see today is far more than that.

Surely by now, those of us who had been saying this summer, ‘Wait until Labor Day and as voters engage, Trump’s support will fade’ would have to admit that has not been the case. A solid third of Republicans remain behind the maniacal mogul in national polls.

The only thing that prevents his candidacy from being a true danger to America and our standing in the world is if something resembling this dream-like scenario were to be the case. This fiction calls for Trump to have been thinking along these lines: “I don’t need the publicity, I’ve had that for years. And I don’t really need the presidency, I can buy favor with the best of them, whoever ends up holing up on Pennsylvania Ave.”

The fictitious version of Trump for president sees his candidacy as a great national gag that he just can’t stop because crowds keep falling for the next most extreme line in the joke.

Prior to launching the campaign, the fake Trump would have said to himself, “I have supported Democrats and Republicans in the past, and since my views outside of business frankly line up much more with a moderate Democrat than they do with any of this unrecognizably Tea Party-centered Republican Party nowadays, I may as well embarrass the whole GOP by showing how I can singlehandedly hijack their nomination process.”

This fake, but idealistic Trump would have said, “Regardless how well I knew I could do, I didn’t start this to make a farce of the political process. Disengaged voters, super PACs and pack media have done well enough on that without me. But now that I have everyone’s attention, let’s see how far to the extreme I can have the voters walk before I can turn around, hold up a mirror, and say, ‘I was kidding, you idiots! We can’t elect a president who wants to lead us on a path to friggin’ genocide, are you crazy?!”

Today’s true believers that the real Trump has inspired would scratch their heads and find another divisive candidate to share their Klan-like zeal. (Trump’s real hate speech is already being used to boost membership in white supremacist organizations, Politico reported.)
And Trump himself would go back to his real projects laughing at all the people he suckered in 2015.

Unfortunately nobody expects this fictitious end game to come about, and many attribute his national popularity to his outsider candidacy.

This may seem novel on the surface, but his simplifying and vilifying have been seen before (albeit without such a strong dose of pure racism and xenophobia).

Jesse Ventura basically ran this same race in 1998 in Minnesota, going from the wrestling ring to the Governor’s Mansion. (See Neely Tucker’s outstanding comparison of Trump and Ventura in The Washington Post.)

Trump’s self-centered world view and genuine lack of care for the safety and security of the American people, is doing far more harm than anything “The Body” did in Minnesota.

Which is why I am so eager for my wishful thinking endgame to this Trumpmare.

It is past time for us all to stop laughing, stop imagining the absurdity of his candidacy, and start realizing how dangerous it would be if one of our two major parties would dare nominate an unrepentant bigot for the highest office in our land.

Simon is the former spokesman for the U.S. Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, a bipartisan Congressional-executive commission that monitors human rights across North America, Europe and Central Asia.