Patrick Smyth: Republicans still waiting for mainstream candidate to depose Trump

Stephen Colbert, host of the US's Late Show, a mix of chat and satire, the other night warned his audience that Donald Trump might actually win the presidency. He got them to intone together as practice: "President Trump, President Trump . . . "

He’s not alone. Conservative and liberal columnists such as Ann Coulter and Leslie Savan have argued recently that, in the wake of Paris, Trump’s brand of virulent Islamophobia is infectious and catching on and could even beat Hillary Clinton.

“It’s easy to laugh at GOPers in denial,” Savan writes, “but progressives who pooh-pooh Trump’s chances of beating Hillary may be whistling past the graveyard of American democracy.”

The collective wisdom after Paris – that voters would gravitate toward a battle-tested, policy-minded candidate for such turbulent times – has yet to take hold. Trump continues to top polls: the Real Clear Politics aggregate of polls puts him on 27 per cent to 19 per cent for his nearest rival, neurosurgeon Ben Carson. Head to head against Clinton, the same polls show her still leading, but only by four percentage points.

Appalled at the prospect he might end up as their candidate, the Republican establishment – which still believes him to be unelectable against Clinton – has been hoping he will eventually be pushed aside by a mainstream candidate. Who or how is still unclear: the latest to make a surge is, however, the scarcely more acceptable Texas senator Ted Cruz, who is now just ahead in polls in early state Iowa.

Yet it is clear that Trump does not need to win to rewrite the agenda as his rivals shuffle uncomfortably into the nativist political territory he occupies.

‘Trojan horses’

Having launched his campaign by demonising Mexican immigrants as rapists and drug smugglers, Trump has shifted his focus to Muslims. In the last week he has spoken of Syria’s refugees as “Trojan horses” for Islamic State and warned that “our president wants to take in 250,000”. (At least three times more than Barack Obama has suggested).

He has also called for a register of all Muslims – which is certainly unconstitutional – suggested they should carry ID cards and warned he would "shut down mosques". He also recalled watching "thousands and thousands" of people in an unnamed "Arab" community in New Jersey cheering as the World Trade Center came down. It simply didn't happen.

Last weekend, he tweeted inaccurate and racist statistics on black crime taken from a neo-Nazi Twitter account and defended the beating up by supporters of a black protester at one of his rallies. He has also called for the resumption of waterboarding terrorist prisoners with the rider that “if it doesn’t work, they deserve it anyway”.

On civil liberties he has said: “We’re going to have to do things that we never did before. And some people are going to be upset about it . . . certain things that were frankly unthinkable a year ago.”

"If it's a lie too vile to utter aloud," the New York Times warns editorially, "count on Mr Trump to say it, often. It wins him airtime, and retweets through the roof."

Extreme views

Most analysts still insist Trump’s lead in the Republican field will fade away as the race gets more serious. But he has undoubtedly transformed the nature of the election debate and the language even of erstwhile “moderates”.

Former Bush aide Michael Gerson in the Washington Post acknowledges that: "One effect has been the legitimisation of even more extreme views – signaling that it is okay to give voice to sentiments and attitudes that, in previous times, people would have been too embarrassed to share in public."

Jeb Bush, who once spoke of immigration as positive, now believes the US should only accept Syrian refugees if Christian, a view echoed by Cruz, while New Jersey governor Chris Christie wants no Syrians at all even if they are "three-year-old orphans". Carson described Syrian refugees as "rabid dogs".

Attempts within Republicanism to mount an anti-Trump campaign appear unlikely to succeed. Republican strategist Ed Rollins says: “Trump’s support is different, they already have heard all the negatives and don’t care . . . Trump is running as the anti-Washington candidate, and this just makes his case: ‘Washington and the Republican establishment don’t want me because I represent you, not them!’”

In truth the Republican party has been hijacked by its own members – currently two-thirds of its voters are backing candidates without establishment support – Trump, Carson, Cruz, and Carly Fiorina. The genie will not go back in the bottle.