If you look at searching trends in Google (go to Google Trends, duh), you see that the minute he started talking about President Obama?s birth certificate in mid-March interest in Trump zoomed upwards, even past interest in Sarah Palin.
That issue ? however bizarre and insinuating his claims ? was Trump?s entree into the US political conversation. His poll numbers shot up like a comb-over in a stiff breeze. For a while he was tied, or even ahead, in some polls of GOP contenders. He was the frontrunner. It was his honeymoon with the voters ? something newly elected US presidents experience, too.
We?ve argued in the past that one reason GOP voters liked him was that he acted as if he?d already won. He was the boss ? laying out ways to deal with China (25 percent tariff on all Chinese goods!), Iraq (seize their oil fields!) and gasoline prices (yell at Saudi Arabia!).
He was presidential, though not president. (And yes, we know his policy solutions were, um, things that perhaps needed to be explored in greater depth prior to implementation. We?re talking about image here, not substance.)
Then there was the day President Obama released his long-form birth certificate. Trump was beside himself. It was the height of his faux presidency.
But that was it. As happens in many actual presidencies, the parallel-universe administration of the not-yet-elected Trump sagged as voters tired of his presence and events intervened. Which events always do.
Donald we hardly knew ye...............
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I'll believe corporations are persons when Texas executes one.: LBJ's Ghost
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