The media and the Republican establishment
keep telling us Donald Trump has peaked and it's all downhill from here. Too bad for them their wishful thinking isn't reflected in the polls.
Yet another poll, this one from CNN/ORC, shows Trump leading the Republican presidential primary.
Trump draws support from 18 percent of Republican registered voters polled, with Jeb Bush following at 15 percent and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker at 10 percent. No other candidate gets into double digits, but with attention turning to which candidates will make the all-important top 10 in the polls to get into the Fox News debate on August 6, Sen. Ted Cruz, Sen. Rand Paul, Sen. Marco Rubio, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, Ben Carson, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, and Ohio Gov. John Kasich round out the top 10. Former Texas Gov. Rick Perry leads the JV squad.
Trump's not going anywhere just yet, in other words. And to compound the nightmare for Republicans interested in winning the general election, 52 percent of Republicans say they don't want Trump to drop out and another 15 percent say they'd rather see him run as an independent—the ultimate Republican general-election nightmare.
It's not just Republicans who need Trump's boom to be a bubble, though. The media may be covering Trump because he makes good television, but at the same time, he's an enormous threat to the media's commitment to portray Republicans as reasonable, responsible participants in policy and politics. If Trump's popularity is for real and the media is forced to admit that, it becomes that much harder to ignore that Rep. Steve King has long been a major force in Republican immigration policy, for instance, or any of a host of other far-right phenomena that the media routinely tries to paint as being out on the fringe rather than where the Republican Party is right now.