Reel Urban News Politics:
Donald Trump is storming towards the nomination. After a landslide victory in New Hampshire, decisive leads in national polling, and heavy leads in the primary states that are voting before Super Tuesday (when much of the rest of the nation finally gets in the game) Donald Trump has made fools out of all of the experts. The man whose candidacy was initially ridiculed as an obnoxious joke by political know-it-alls on the left and the right, now seems all but unstoppable in his march towards the nomination.
What has been most astonishing, arguably, about Trumps rise is that he has achieved dominance in Republican Party polls by not only while assaulting the Republican Party establishment (he’s not the only one, though he’s the best at it) but while running a campaign that could only be loosely described as conservative.
Donald Trump, a longtime Democrat before deciding to run for president as a Republican, has over the course of his campaign promised to raise taxes on Wall Street, praised the work of Planned Parenthood (while promising to defund it if it continues providing abortions), said he supports the individual mandate in Obamacare (while at the same vociferously opposing Obamacare), decried the War in Iraq, and went as far as to suggest that George W. Bush’s administration lied about weapons of mass destruction to push America into that war.
Indeed, Trump’s candidacy has been characterized by extremes in all directions, both in terms of his rhetoric (dismissing the war record of John McCain, vulgarly implying Megyn Kelly was on her period during the first Fox News debate, making fun of a disabled reporters disability, the list goes on) and in terms of his policies. He began his campaign by promising to deport all illegal or undocumented immigrants. He then moved to promising a temporary ban on all Muslim immigrants to the United States for national security reasons. Now, after having pushed so hard to the right it made most conservative intellectuals nauseous, he has now lurched radically to the left in a way that has some of his fiercest critics on the left feeling uncomfortably delighted.
Donald Trump is the definition of unpredictable. Whether he can win a general election remains to be seen. It is an even greater mystery, perhaps, what a Donald Trump presidency would actually look like. There is no way to determine from his political philosophy (what is that, by the way?) what policy positions he might take from day to day.
All that is clear about Donald Trump is that he will do whatever it takes to win. For better, or for worse.
