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Super Tuesday certain to be a major test

In the sports-metaphor world of presidential election punditry, Donald Trump has landed some right crosses, but he hasn’t knocked anyone out yet. He’s played a few great holes, but the tournament isn’t won on the first day. He is leading after about 25 laps, but it’s a 200-lap race.

He has pointed the way to a new political landscape in America, where actual policy is replaced by bombastic rhetoric to win the day.

America’s anger has anointed its king. The politics of past generations no longer holds sway with a large swath of disillusioned Americans whose hopes for genuine and lasting reform that creates wealth, reduces spending and generally stays out of daily life have been destroyed by seven years of liberalism at the helm and gridlock in Congress.

Trump, with his win in the Nevada caucuses Tuesday, solidified his position as a threat to be faced by old-line political leaders and even by those would-be radical reformers who haven’t reformed much since the advent of the Tea Party.

The question that remains to be answered, however, is whether anger translates into ability to lead. It hasn’t worked so far for the Tea Party reformers, other than to split the GOP into a party where Trump could rise.

Trump and his followers are fond to latch onto the death of political correctness in his conduct. Political correctness does create timidity and reduces conversation and the ability to make a point to nothing more than an exercise in fear. But leadership and diplomacy require a certain level of civility, and there is a massive difference between civility and political correctness. So far, we see Trump as embodying neither. A ranting man who goads his followers into yelling obscenities into the press pen or who talks about how he’d love to punch a protester in the mouth is hardly presidential. It’s not even folksy Harry Truman presidential.

For now, it’s enough to rile up the masses to harass the press at his events or to chant like a protester when the stage lights are too bright, to play into the national angry mood to win over voters. It works. Jeb Bush spent $130 million in South Carolina and got no delegates. The old rules about big spending and media blitzes have fallen on hard times.

What will matter eventually, should there be a President Trump, is just what would happen when Trump has to work with Congress.

We’re hard pressed to figure out just who he would ask to be his running mate, let alone figuring out who would accept if asked.

The last big test, perhaps, of his staying power comes on Super Tuesday next week, with a dozen states at stake for primaries.

We hope the folks in those states think carefully.

Americans might just get what they want out of their anger and send him into the fall elections, only to find the other side could win again.

editorial@tribtoday.com

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