And yet you keep inviting him to your conventions.
Watching conservatives grapple with Donald Trump's announcement that he will be running for president
will never stop being funny.
[J]ust maybe Trump is a double agent for the Left. [...] He reinforces all the Left’s negative stereotypes of conservatives as ignorant blowhards. During his announcement speech last week, Trump said of Mexican immigrants: “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists, and some, I assume, are good people.” [...]
Indeed, Donald Trump seems eager to alienate sane voters by embracing conspiracy theories wherever he can find them. [...]
Trump is also one of America’s premier crony capitalists.
So he's a loudmouthed buffoon that dabbles in racism and crackpot conspiracy theories and whose rhetoric about freedom and small government and whatnot gets flushed right quick when bigger government would make him a quick buck, and yet among Republicans he's polling better than many of the so-called "serious" candidates? Wow, go figure.
Of course, none of these things are peculiar to Trump, though he does do a fine job of enunciating those things a bit louder than anyone else. The notion that Mexican immigrants are predominantly drug smugglers comes direct from the mouth of Rep. Steve King, the frothy, rally staging monarch of House Republican immigration policy. The notion of minorities being criminals who are coming after the womenfolk has a long, long history in racist circles, but has prominent modern incarnation in the rantings of the hard-right National Rifle Association and their assorted political enablers as one of the common reasons why all the good white conservative folk need guns and need a lot of them.
As for the (other) conspiracy theories? Trump's obsession with whether Barack Obama is secretly not an American has been a popular theory among the Republican base throughout his presidency, and Trump's theories on vaccines and autism and secret scientific conspiracies is not substantively stupider than certain snowball-throwing senators' declarations that the world's scientists are conspiring against our good friends the oil companies because reasons, or House Republicans "investigating" everything supposed government ammunition hoarding, or the Texas governor promising he'll be keeping an eye on those Jade Helm troops to make sure those military exercises aren't the beginnings of a secret military occupation of his state.
What's this? Trump says that we can solve the Middle East problem easily by showing some strength and resolve and doing some further unspecified thing he'll only share with us after we've elected him, and that Iraq and now Syria turned sour only because Obama wasn't projecting strengthiness and resolviness enough in the first place? That's a stump-speech staple that most of the other Republican candidates could recite in their sleep by now.
It would be easier to declare him a double agent of the "Left" or a fringe candidate meant to make Republicans look bad if, again, he wasn't doing well enough in Republican polls to land himself a debate slot. If he's a cartoonish science-denying racist corporatist blowhard and the Republican base likes him, well, that points to the party having a different problem.