Jul 22, 2015 4 min read

If you don’t think Donald Trump can get any crazier, just wait a day. He might prove you wrong.

The real estate mogul and TV reality show star has risen to the top of the heap in some polls gauging the popularity of 2016 Republican presidential candidates. That doesn’t so much speak poorly of the party itself. Anyone can run for president, even the perpetually unhinged, like Trump. But it does say something about the Republican voter pool, and what it says isn’t good.

The existence of populist demagogues is not a recent development in our nation’s politics, but their number at the national level has grown by leaps and bounds in the last 15 years or so, and we can’t help but wonder at the role of Fox News and talk radio, both of which seem to preach to its viewers and listeners it’s a good thing to be intellectually incurious and mean-spirited to the extreme and reactionary.

The poster child of this trend is Sarah Palin, the Alaska governor who was plucked from relative obscurity to serve as the running mate of Sen. John McCain in 2008. Her lack of fitness to be a heartbeat away from the presidency should have been glaringly obvious to everyone – except, of course, to the voters who thought it would be a great idea to have “Caribou Barbie” in the White House.

But Palin seems like a stable, rational human being when placed next to Trump, whose scorched-earth style included racist comments about people from Mexico and an assertion McCain, who spent years in a Vietnamese POW camp, was no kind of hero.

Many of the other Republican candidates – but not all – took Trump to task for that last attack. One of them, Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, called Trump “the world’s biggest jackass” and said on “CBS This Morning” that “even the jackasses” were offended by Trump’s comments about McCain. Trump responded by giving out Graham’s personal cellphone number during a South Carolina political rally and basically suggesting his supporters call the senator.

One has to imagine the more stable and cerebral candidates such as Jeb Bush and Sen. Marco Rubio are letting this circus sideshow play out with the knowledge, or at least the hope, GOP voters will ultimately come to their senses and coalesce around a person who will not only appeal to Republicans, but also perhaps to conservative Democrats and independents. Rubio pointed out the other day, “To conduct the presidency, it has to be done in a dignified way, with a level of class. I don’t think the way (Donald Trump has) behaved over the last few weeks is either dignified or worthy of the office he seeks.”

People often say both major political parties are the same, but we feel certain if a carnival barker like Al Sharpton or a TV buffoon like Jerry Springer (yes, he was born in England, so he’s not actually allowed to run) entered the Democratic presidential race in 2016, their support would be negligible. Not so with their equivalents on the Republican side of the aisle. The rise of Trump in the polls illustrates a degree of name-recognition, sure, but it also represents the extent to which rhetoric on the right has become coarse and hyperbolic.

Humorist and political commentator Andy Borowitz said the other day, “In earlier eras, we chose presidents who had been military commanders because we assumed they would be good at leading. Now we choose people who have been on TV a lot. I just point this out because this seems like a good reason to kill ourselves.”

He’s joking (we think), but the rise of Donald Trump is certainly a cause for considerable shame.