Donald Trump should not be considered a serious contender for the presidency. That being said, he could perhaps be the most influential change-maker in American partisan discourse of the last few decades. While certainly presidents Clinton, Bush and Obama have altered how the American body politic works, Trump stands capable of dismantling it. In an election cycle featuring two behemoths of political dynasties, the largest ego belongs to the candidate who said “I have never gone bankrupt” while filing for bankruptcy. What Trump is doing, in the end, isn’t about himself. Whether he knows it or not, he is poised to become the executioner of the far-right sector of American politics.
Comparisons have been made between the roles of Trump and Theodore Roosevelt in dividing the Republican vote, but these are fanciful. Where the progressive hero Roosevelt was a candidate espousing rational ideas and had a reasonable shot at the presidency, Trump is (consciously or not) making a sheer mockery of the right-wing views he has come to embrace, despite having no history of holding political views for longer than is convenient. This long-form satire is forcing the Republican establishment to realize that a vocal wing of their party is nostalgic for an era remarkably similar to that of the 1890s, where women lacked basic access to healthcare, racial minorities were treated with the basest contempt, only white men were allowed to vote, economic inequality soared and moral puritanism ran high. The Republican Party, via Trump, is now forced to either embrace those views and watch their support die as the demographics of the country change, or begin the process of moderating their tones, as the Democratic Party did in the 1990s.
This is quite a strange era of American politics. The two major establishment candidates are finding strong and enthusiastic challenges from within their own party. Clinton seems lifeless and haunted by the ghosts of her 2008 “inevitability” being overrun by a charismatic liberal with an appeal to young voters. The only excitement that "Jeb!" seems to be generating is at the end of his campaign logo, where the exclamation point is essentially designed to stop us from conjuring his tainted surname. It is also important to note that Bernie Sanders is not playing the same role as Trump. Which is to say that the Democratic Party, centrist in global political terms, is not of the same species as the Republican Party, which crawls ever closer to the right-most border of the global political spectrum.
It could very well be that Donald Trump does the unthinkable and ends up generating something positive for society. In the words of Republican strategist Matthew Dowd, “Do I think that he [Trump] can be the badly needed match that burns down the status quo? Yes. Do I think he could precipitate an advent of a real third party? Yes.” Trump is changing the political discourse in this country singlehandedly through deft command of the media and an endless campaign budget. If this circus lasts all the way to the general election, there are going to be very real consequences for the entire American political alignment, especially for those on the right. However awkward those questions may be about Mexico, China or women, especially given the demographic shift in the United States away from elderly white voters towards an increasingly diverse electorate, which favors the Democratic Party, those questions are worth asking sooner rather than later.