Rand Paul Takes on Trump, Trump Crushes Rand

As we pointed out, Trump is no Rudy Giuliani-like flash in the pan.

Mr. Trump is continuing to dominate with 25% support nationally while Dr. Ben Carson, is running 2nd at 12%. Texas Senator Ted Cruz is 3rd at 10%. Those findings mirror recent polls in Iowa and elsewhere.

Jeb Bush has place 9% for a 4th place finish, dropping from 15% and 2nd place in a Fox News poll conducted earlier this month, before the first GOP presidential debate.

Scott Walker, the Wisconsin governor, is tied for 5th, at 6% — down from 9% earlier this month.

In the new Fox News poll, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee is tied with Walker for 5th at 6%. They’re followed by former Hewlett Packard CEO Carly Fiorina at 5%, Ohio Gov. John Kasich and Sen. Marco Rubio at 4%, and then New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, who both are at 3%.

Rand Paul thought the wise play was to take on Trump. Trump gained another point even with all the media attacking him, and Paul is now at 3%.

What this means is even people who are not in Trump’s camp like his message, and want to hear more of it, even if they are putatively supporting another candidate. To attack Trump is to attack someone conservatives have a natural affinity for, and to distance yourself from the conservative voting public.

Clearly, Cruz’s play was the wise move for the candidates who are not Donald Trump. Make friends, support the message, and focus on attacking the enemy. Now conservatives who are looking for somebody to vote for will see Trump and Cruz espousing anti-establishment conservatism and attacking our enemies, as if a team. Everyone else looks like petty, spiteful politicians who are either obediently doing the bidding of a shadowy cabal, or selfishly trying to manipulate others into giving them power for megalomaniacal reasons – men for whom the true cause, vanquishing our enemies, is wholly unimportant.

Trump is changing the debate, and people like it. He is making confrontation more accepted, and even enjoyed. He is making pacifism reviled, and useless to win power. He is showing other Republicans that to oppose his positions is to kill their own candidacy.

He is even creating new expectations in the Republican party. Where before we would have been overjoyed to close the border, he takes it a step further, demanding the end of birthright citizenship and demanding Mexico pay us to close the border. Now everyone else who is running will have to shift their positions so far to sate our new, enlarged appetite/demand for Trump-level conservatism, that they will seem phony if they do, and too weak to elect if they don’t. In staking out his position, and defending it, he makes everyone else’s position untenable, and unable to be changed easily.

As he is feeding the appetites of the aggressive, he is creating more aggressive people through exposure to his confrontational, K-stimuli, all of whom will be attracted to his message. He is getting a hand from the r to K shift, but even as it helps him, he helps it.

Trump has a political brilliance, a strategic brilliance, a thoroughness in showmanship unlike anything anybody else running has, a personal image perfect for maximizing his control over public opinion through the rhetorical strategy of hyperbole, and the money to do this his own way, right, without needing to be phony to satisfy some donor or other.

Anybody who thinks he is a flash in the pan is clueless. If he isn’t a brilliant play by some shadowy cabal to destroy the Tea Party, if he is real and as he appears, I think he will be the greatest force of this political cycle, and in time he may prove to be the greatest political force in a century.

Trump cometh.