Peter Sagal on "Wait, Wait Don't Tell Me" said he had a hard time understanding someone saying that they didn't know whether to vote for Sanders or Trump which he said was like asking should I eat this fine homemade meal cooked with loving care or that flaming bag of crap someone threw on my porch yesterday?

The campaign has the morbid fascination of viewing a train wreck. I'm curious as to what Hillary Clinton's team is really thinking about the prospect of facing Trump in the general election. Could they be salivating over the prospect and praying that Trump gets to Cleveland with at least 1,237 delegates, so that the convention won't be brokered and a harder-to-defeat candidate be chosen? With DT's very high unfavorable polling with the electorate, it doesn't appear that HRT will need to bend over backwards to trounce Trump. It's very hard to imagine his support expanding beyond the admittedly large core of devoted Trumpites. But that core is small in comparison to the number of voters who will turn out next November.

I can't recall a single candidate in my lifetime for whom I felt such disgust, not even George Wallace.

I still believe that Trump won't get the nomination. I think the convention will be brokered in the end. That's the whole reason Trump is threatening riots. He knows that the party can change its rules anytime it wants and contest his nomination and he is saying, you better not try that. Of course, that opens up the idea of who the candidate will be. Cruz is next in line but has thus far lost fair and square so they would have to nominate someone currently not in the race. They say Romney but he'll just lose again and seems to be singlehandedly destroying Clear Channel radio. So it will be interesting. Especially if there are riots. Then there is a group of 12,000 republican idiots (redundant term to be sure) that want to be allowed to bring firearms saying that anything less steps on their 2nd Amendment rights! So imagine that! 12,000 armed, paranoid, delusional people and a huge riot breaks out. Pass the popcorn, I'm ready!

Three influential leaders of the conservative movement have summoned other top conservatives for a closed-door meeting Thursday in Washington, D.C., to talk about how to stop Donald Trump and, should he become the Republican nominee, how to run a third-party “true conservative” challenger in the fall.
3/15/16
http://www.politico.com/story/2016/03/t ... ump-220786

The GOP convention could be disastrous no matter what happens. The above suggests if Trump is nominated, a conservative 3rd party candidate will run. However if Trump has a yooge lead in delegates and is denied the nomination, he will probably run as 3rd party. What a mess...

Given all that, the GOP convention simply cannot happen in a "gun free zone", it would be much too dangerous. The more guns, the safer everyone will be!

Esactly, Anderson Cooper.

http://uproxx.com/news/anderson-cooper-donald-trump/

That is the argument, and behavior of a 5 year old.

And when that's pointed out, Trump starts a spat with Anderson Cooper.
This is not a president. This is an idiot.

Maybe even somebody who fits a clinical definition of the word. Someone driven by the Id.
What he thinks hurdles through his teeth before any kind of cross-checking with a conscious mind.

The president cannot be this way. The president MUST be diplomatic. His every statement will be weighed and measured a thousand ways and people will look for subtle meanings in every nuance.

Can you trust a man like this with critical secrets of state? Absolutely not.

If Trump can't take even minor criticisms from other candidates or journalists, imagine how he'll react when a world leader criticizes him. No matter you feel about Obama, his strength lay in his ability to not snap back at nasty remarks made about him. Even when they went after his daughters, he stayed out of it and let the press and pundits take those people to task. He is the very picture of restraint and poise. Imagine President Trump giving a SOTU address and some idiot congressman yells out, "YOU LIE!" Trump will have a conniption. "PUNCH HIM IN THE FACE!!!! SOMEBODY PUNCH THAT OBNOXIOUS ASSHOLE IN THE FACE!!!! DON'T INTERRUPT ME!! SOMEBODY STOMP THE SHIT OUTTA HIM!!!" I'll be rubbing my temples muttering, "This just can't be. This just canNOT be!"

Plus a guy like that is easy to control. All you have to do is offer a criticism and then watch him fly off the handle so that everyone sees what a jerk he is. It's just too easy. He cannot be president which is why I say that he won't get the nomination. They HAVE to find a way to give it to someone else. Anyone but Trump, basically. I mean, not Sarah Palin or some dumbass like that but somebody. Taking a stab at it, I believe it will be Kasich in the end. Despite the fact that he gets less votes than Rubio who has already dropped out, nationally, Kasich has a chance where Trump or Cruz do not.

After reading a Wall Street Journal account of Trump's amateurish approach to preparations for a general election, I think the title of this thread is incorrect.

In terms of every ability and quality we'd like to see in a president, he's a joke, yes. But what D B was referring to was the viability of his candidacy. That has turned out to be no joke.

Trump's viability, as far as I can tell, is restricted to less than half of the Republican base, and does not extend to an electable proportion of the total voting public. As such, his candidacy is a joke, except for the ominous signal regarding medium term cultural trends.

Here is a great article in the New York Review of Books. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/04 ... e-stopped/ One disturbing thing here is how much Trump has produced a morbid fascination, in a way that has people imagining he is really on the brink of power.

I don't think he's electable, either, but just to be the nominee of one of the two major parties is extraordinary, and that is still probable. We've not had any nominee in modern times--or maybe ever--as far off the beaten track as Trump. The NY Review of Books piece brings in another aspect of, and reason for, Trump's rise, that the media are reveling in the spectacle and finding it nicely lucrative. The reality tv star gets to be the star of his own political reality show, courtesy of the media. without spending very much of his fortune or needing to pander to donors. It's a good gig.