������Ƶ

That increasingly loud scream you’re hearing is not a figment of your imagination. It’s the Republican establishment collectively freaking out over what some say seems to be the steadily increasing likelihood that boorish huckster Donald Trump will win the GOP presidential nomination and doom the party to a third consecutive White House loss.

We are now less than two months away from the Feb. 1 caucuses in Iowa, and Trump, who many thought would fade months ago (including me), shows few signs of weakening.

New polling from Iowa shows he’s holding steady in second place among likely caucus goers, while Ben Carson and have traded their first and third place positions. But despite clear advantages among evangelicals, tea party supporters and voters who regularly take part in the caucuses, Cruz only has a lead that is about the size of the poll’s margin of error.

Trump, meanwhile, holds a commanding 13.7 percent lead in the , and an even larger lead — 15 percent — in New Hampshire, which holds its primary Feb. 9. There is a substantial possibility that Trump will head into South Carolina on Feb. 20, where he currently leads second place Ben Carson by more than 6 percent, having won or placed second in the first two primaries.

Most campaigns would call that momentum. And they would be right.

The reasons for Trump’s durability have been hotly debated around the country, but the most obvious and least surprising of them is this: The electorate to which Trump appeals is exactly the demographic that the Republican Party has been cultivating for years now. Trump’s ascent is no anomaly; it’s a logical response to the politics for which the party is best known these days, both within and outside the GOP.

There is no more certain way to anger a traditional Republican than to point out that fact. But when the party brand has been defined by tea party belligerance, congressional fights that at a minimum often cast the party as racist, anti-women and anti-gay and governance efforts that too often seem ill-informed, unsuccessful and frankly stupid, it shouldn’t shock anyone that a candidate who embodies the brand is leading the pack.

‘If Trump Is The Nominee, We Lose’

Still, not everyone thinks Trump’s nomination is a lock. Public opinion guru Nate Silver, whose dead-on electoral analyses have made him the nation’s star math nerd, continues to be dismissive.

In a memorably titled chat transcript on his FiveThirtyEight.com website (“”), Silver points out that, historically, “not only have Trump-like candidates not won (their parties’ nominations), but they haven’t come particularly close to winning.” Candidates leading at this time in competitive past races — particularly self-styled outsider candidates — simply haven’t been able to sustain their momentum.

Silver says Trump’s nature as a “divisive figure” within the party gives him little room to grow because the lack of support from the party establishment will deny him the resources to move much beyond the 25 to 30 percent he’s getting now.

And “it’s not just that Trump has no support from his party,” said the statistician who correctly picked the presidential results in 49 of 50 states in 2008 and all 50 in 2012. “It’s that the party is actively looking to stop him because he’d be a catastrophe as their nominee.”

Which gets us back to the screaming we were noticing at the beginning of all this. It’s not as though the majority of the party’s top supporters have been struck with collective amnesia; they know the many unfortunate things that have come out of the Donald’s face hole during his long career as a media curiosity and more recently as a candidate.

And so they cringe at the thought of spending millions of dollars trying to make a case for someone whose public remarks would have already driven a candidate with any sense of decency not only from the race but from public life in general.

They know that gems like the following will be the gifts that keep on giving for the Democratic nominee, and if they’re honest with themselves, they know such remarks make it impossible for Trump to win a general election in a multi-cultural, diverse nation such as ours:

• “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best,” he said as part of the press conference announcing his candidacy. “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.”
• “You know, it doesn’t really matter what (the media) write as long as you’ve got a young and beautiful piece of ass.” — Trump on women in a notable 1991 Esquire interview, just one in a long list of appalling, mysogynistic things he’s expressed throughout the years, such as his back in August. Other individual targets have included , and, famously, .)
• “Laziness is a trait in blacks. It really is. I believe that.” – by John O’Donnell, former president of Trump Plaza Hotel & Casino. Elsewhere in the book, Trump manages to be simultaneously anti-black and demeaning to Jews: “Black guys counting my money! I hate it. The only kind of people I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes every day.”
• And bringing us right up to the current moment, Trump for an outrageous and immediately condemned call to bar all Muslims from entering the United States. “… our country cannot be the victims of horrendous attacks by people that believe only in jihad, and have no sense of reason or respect for human life,” he blathered.

No less an establishment figure than former White House Chief of Staff and New Hampshire turns off “80 percent of America.” “If Trump is the nominee, we lose — as Republicans, we lose the Senate, we lose most of the House and we lose the presidency,” Sununu said in a recent interview.

Trump May Not Matter To Hawaii

As crazy as all of this is right now, it ultimately may be of little consequence for Hawaii voters.

Our state represents roughly the mid-point in primary season: We are among four — the others being Idaho, Mississippi and Michigan — that vote three months from now on March 8. GOP caucus-goers here will select 19 delegates for the Republican National Convention that day, to candidates based on popular vote.

The race dynamics may have changed entirely by then, with some who look strong now on the wane, others out of the race altogether and perhaps different frontrunners leading in the polls. But maybe not.

Leave it to the feckless Hawaii GOP, by the way, to reduce the impact of its tiny number of delegates by awarding them through allocation rather than as a winner-takes-all lump sum. Donald Trump would have never backed such a process — he’s way too smart for that, as on Twitter.

“Sorry losers and haters, but my I.Q. is one of the highest — and you all know it! Please don’t feel so stupid or insecure. It’s not your fault.”