The Trump slump

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[/audioplayer]Lunatics with money are never ‘mad’, only eccentric. In America, they are also Republican presidential candidates. So Donald Trump, a barmy billionaire with a mouth bigger than his bank balance is leading the race to be the party’s next nominee. It’s a sad indictment of the American political process. And it is a distraction from how strong American conservatism could be.

More than a dozen major Republicans are standing. Jeb Bush is notable for his establishment support, Scott Walker for his credentials as a governor who took on the unions, Marco Rubio for his charisma and ethnicity. In such a wide field, however, polling points are spread thin. Trump’s on top with only around 18 per cent support — outpacing more serious candidates largely because people have heard of him.

Trump is famous as a businessman and a TV personality, and for having hair that looks like something which laid down and died on his head. His politics are capricious. He has in the past been an independent, a Democrat, one of Hillary Clinton’s donors, a Tea Party maverick and a birther who demanded to see President Obama’s birth certificate; now he’s an everyman who hates Chinese businessmen and illegal Mexican migrants. He launched his candidacy by saying that Mexico was sending its rapists across the border, and is now involved in a row about whether a man sexually assaulting his wife ought to qualify as rape. Senator John McCain, the former presidential candidate, said that Trump had ‘fired up the crazies’. Trump replied that McCain was only considered a war hero because of his time in a Vietnamese prison camp, adding: ‘I like people who weren’t captured.’