Last year, I wrote about Donald Trump extensively. Most of those articles can be found on The Inquisitr. While I don’t have an exact count, I wrote about him a lot. It would be fair to say that I’ve been following Trump’s campaign for President quite closely.
Last summer, I thought the Trump campaign was a kind of joke. I only started writing about Trump because the whole country was fixated on him. Frankly, I thought another candidate would eventually overtake his campaign.
As the Summer of Trump came to an end, I started to see him as a real candidate and I realized he wasn’t going to be pushed out of the race. Analysts and commentators kept predicting his fall, but it never came.
Time after time, Donald Trump would say something that the public deemed offensive. However, instead of suffering, his campaign only gained traction. People really seemed to value his uncensored message. This sort of campaigning really is unheard of. If another candidate were to say some of the things Trump has said, they would be finished a long time ago. He truly is a political juggernaut, and this characteristic of his no doubt frightens his opponents.
The Trump campaign really forced the country to take the candidate seriously after his huge wins during the first Republican primaries. Just recently, his complete sweep of the five North Eastern states of Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Delaware, Maryland, and New York, solidified his path towards becoming the GOP nominee in the 2016 race.
Some will say that Cruz can still stop Trump, but I would call that wishful thinking. There really is no way to stop him at this point in the game. The #NeverTrump movement has failed miserably. Today, Trump will enjoy another victory when he wins Indiana’s Republican primary. Yes, that was a prediction.
The fact that Trump has come this far, considering how much negativity has been directed at him, is truly impressive. Not many politicians could survive the onslaught of backlash to their campaigns that Trump, a businessman, has overcome. It’s really remarkable. Perhaps the fact that he’s not a career politician really does have its benefits.
Let’s assume that “the Donald” becomes the GOP nominee. He will then have to survive the best ads the DNC can throw at him. He’s already proven that he can handle attacks without losing support, so we can presume that these ads will do little harm to him. We can also assume that his ads against Hillary will be just as harsh. However, if his resiliency prevails, we might see him beat Hillary in November.
Hillary has a track record that is harder to defend than Trump’s. Donald Trump has been in business his whole life, not politics. Hillary is the exact opposite. In this election, the one thing voters on both sides have rejected, although not so much on the Democrat side, is the status quo politician. Those who spend their entire lives wrapped up in the world of politics can sometimes become boring and drone-like, and it has become clear that voters are now rejecting them.
While Bernie Sanders has spent nearly his entire career in politics, he’s far from your usual Democratic candidate. That’s why so many love Bernie, and the same can be said about Donald. He’s not your standard GOP candidate to say the least. Throughout this election year, being different and not as boring as most politicians is going to be an advantage.
Some of Trump’s noisiest critics like to quote polls that show a hypothetical matchup between him and Hillary in the general election. They say that he will get completely destroyed come November. While that may be true, it’s way too early to be relying on polls for such a thing. Just the other day, Rasmussen released a poll that showed Trump leading Hillary by two points. That may be just one poll, but could it signal a change in the trend? We’ll find out shortly.
One thing is for sure, Donald Trump is going to be the Republican nominee in this year’s race for the White House. There is absolutely no way either of his rivals can take that away from him at this point. The deal has been sealed.
[Photo credit: Matt Johnson]