Say what you will about the Donald, he has always been really good at being a caricature.  The hair.  The voice.  The casinos.  The bankruptcies.  The wives.  “You’re fired.”  And he makes a really good cartoon candidate.  I’m just waiting for him to let us all in on the joke.

When he announced he was running, it was a chuckle-worthy moment.  Yeah, right, this will be an entertaining way to kick off another long  campaign season.  True to form, he started saying things that were, well, shockingly wrong for most anyone to say, let alone a presidential candidate. Sexist, racist, thoughtless.  McCain isn’t a war hero, because he got captured.  Ship out all of the immigrants on day one.  All 13 million of them. We have an African-American president and we’ve never had it so bad.  Look at that face.  Who would vote for her?

At first, I thought he had dementia.  I mean, the things that he said were so unfiltered and bizarre.  Isn’t that what happens when someone starts to <ahem> lose touch?  I waited for his family to issue a statement that he was ill and withdrawing his candidacy.  Nope.

Ok, so maybe he isn’t sick.  He’s just full of himself.  He has been a business mogul and those guys get away with saying a lot of crap.  He has money (according to him, one of his most endearing qualities).  He has power and influence.  I’ve worked with guys like this.  They surround themselves with people who agree, people who pander, people who never, ever suggest that they may be wrong.  You ordered a double espresso, but you wanted a triple?  I’m so sorry.  The barista has been fired.

He’s a bully.  He taunts, embarrasses, belittles.  When he doesn’t know the answer (take, for example, any matter of international affairs), he pounds his chest and tells us Hilary screwed up and when he is the leader of all things, he will be so AMAZING, you won’t believe.

Rather than the public floggings that we have come to expect when a political type makes one small error of fact, people love his eccentricities.  They find his candor refreshing and freeing.  He is the antidote to the politically correct.  They seem to miss that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about most of the time.  They can’t see past his quaint, if offensive, views to wonder how his foot-filled mouth might be received by, say, Putin.

He leads in the polls, even now, after he claimed that thousands and thousands of Jersey City Arabs were rejoicing in the streets after the twin towers collapsed.  No one remembers the dancing Arabs.  There were no supporting press reports or videos.  The thing is, Trump is so convincing in his wrong-ness that even Chris Christie, New Jersey’s Governor, couldn’t immediately say with conviction that Trump is plain making  stuff up.

And so, I’m looking forward to the movie gotcha moment.  In my mind, he walks to the podium, not one carefully placed hair askew, grabs the microphone, turns to the cameras and says to the American people, “You’re fired!” He tells us that he did everything he could think of to make himself unelectable.  He said all the wrong things, made stuff up, insulted everyone and still he got the vote.  “What is wrong with you people, that you would endorse me as a candidate for president?”  Mic drop.  Exit, stage left.

“He’s teaching me to change my instincts… or at least ignore them.” — Sheila, Waiting for Guffman