The knives are out, the sharks are circling, reporters and establishment Republicans everywhere are licking their lips at the thought ... is Donald Trump's campaign finally stalling? The evidence: He appeared before some
partly empty rooms in South Carolina, seeming defensive and less confident than usual. And
while he's still leading in the polls, his numbers may be leveling off or dropping slightly:
The latest national Quinnipiac University survey released Thursday provided some fuel to wishful rivals. Trump still leads among registered Republican voters with 25 percent, statistically unchanged from last month's Quinnipiac survey that put him at 28 percent. Yet it's the second major national poll this week showing a slight decrease from last month — Trump experienced an 8-point drop in the CNN/ORC survey released Sunday. (A Fox poll released Wednesday evening also showed Trump with relatively stalled momentum, and a Bloomberg survey of the GOP field showed Trump in a holding pattern at 21 percent).
The thing is, those polls all still do show him leading by healthy margins. So while Trump may be entering a downturn, he may also just have hit a ceiling—that's higher than any of his competitors have reached. It's hard to know, especially with a media that's been predicting his imminent fall since he first started rising in the polls and a Republican establishment that wants to make it happen. Trump and Fox News are
on the outs again, and recent primary drop-out Scott Walker is actively
organizing against Trump, attributing his decision to leave the race to the feeling that it would help bring Trump down, and arguing that other trailing candidates should do the same. He told donors that he's "challenging others in this race to consider making this decision because I believe in the end if we narrow the field to just a few quality, positive alternatives to the frontrunner, it's not only good for the party it's good for the country." (This is also a great way for Walker to suck up to top Republican donors and any eventual non-Trump nominee.)
Trump may be decisively falling. He may be in a brief slump that could provide Walker, Republican donors, the other candidates, and the media a chance to bring him down ... or from which he could recover as quickly as he can find a new outrageous way to hit the sweet spot of the Republican base. But considering that political reporters have been predicting his crash all along, it's hard to trust their assessments this time around.