Demea wrote:
Also, in before gbaji argues that Trump is and always was a true Scotsman who will be competitive against Hillary in November.
Nope. I've always said that Trump isn't a conservative, but a populist wearing a Republican suit. The problem is that there's a decent chance that he will beat Clinton in November, and all those people laughing as they went to the polls to vote for Trump thinking they were sabotaging the GOP will certainly have accomplished that, but sabotaged themselves even more in the process. What's funny is that I really think that the long process has helped Trump in this regard. It's meant that the media has had to play off his oddities and absurd statements so as to not really hurt him (more laughing with him than at him). But they've been doing this for so long now that I'm not sure they can reverse that and now switch to seriously condemning his statements like they should have been from day one. They'll try, but the public has now become so used to just laughing off everything that comes out of Trumps mouth as just an eccentricity and not something threatening, that I don't think that will work.
And Clinton will just have a hard time going after him. Again, he's been so completely transparent about his offensive nature, and had it not harm him politically, that she more or less has nothing to throw at him that hasn't already been used (and rejected by the public as mattering). She, on the other hand, has been more or less treated with kid gloves by Sanders, and so there's a ton of "new" material (new to the general voting public, that is).
While I'm loathe to say it, I wouldn't make the assumption that a Trump nomination spells victory for Clinton and the Democrats at all. I dislike entirely what he says and almost certainly whatever the heck his platform is (if he ever gets around to forming one), but he does have a pretty massive populist movement behind him, and a completely willingness to own himself, warts and all. That's a hard target to attack, and may be a hard target to beat.