THE TOXIC AVENGER

Okay, friends, under normal circumstances, I prefer to blog about movies, book news, occasional travels, and other fun stuff. But these circumstances are so not normal.

The clown show that is the Donald Trump presidential campaign is so surreal, so much like a bad movie, it just screams for commentary. Who am I to resist?

I'll leave the jokes for the pros. (Besides, this campaign is such a joke already, it defies the job of satire to make it seem even more ridiculous.) I'm more interested in how we've come to this truly bizarro point in our collective public life.

Um, I have an idea.

For about the last 30 years, and certainly the  last eight or ten — in an effort to defeat Obama (unsuccessful), and control Congress (successful) — the GOP has not only admitted, but actively courted every nutsquad out there with a grudge: Tea Party loonies, birthers, homophobes, xenophobes, anti-abortion terrorists, racists, religious right fanatics, climate change deniers, neo-Nazis — you name it.

There are plenty of people who are mad as hell and not going to take it any more. They're sure somebody is to blame for whatever's wrong in their lives, but they don't know who. All they need a target for their rage, and if there's one thing Trump actually does know how to do, it's incite unfocused minds to rage.

("What are you rebelling against?" biker Marlon Brando is asked in The Wild One. "Whattya got?" Brando drawls back. Trump is a master at serving up a bogeyman-du-jour from one speech to the next.)

 Add this bag of mixed nuts to the traditional, conservative GOP power elite of Wall Street, Big Pharma, predatory lenders, real estate scammers, and corporate America — that is, most of the folks responsible for their problems in the first place — and you get an unholy alliance of epic proportions.

Trump is like the Toxic Avenger, the goo that rises up out of this muck to overwhelm the mad scientist (or party) that created him. And now that he's finally beginning to self-destruct under the weight of his own bloated arrogance, Republican leaders are scrambling to save what's left of their party.

But it's too late for that. The damage is so done.

As soon as the GOP grudgingly named Trump to top their ticket, they've been willing to overlook his complete lack of policies, his woeful ignorance of foreign affairs, his inability to prep for a debate, his refusal to release his damning tax returns, and the outright lies and other random things that come out of his mouth on the stump.

He'll tell his cheering fans anything. He'll bring US business back from China (but that's where he sends all his own manufacturing). He'll get Americans to work again — he just won't pay them. (Look at his own record of stiffing contractors and other employees who worked for him.)

It's taken the almost daily allegations of repulsive sexual conduct in these last couple of weeks to alert even the most comatose of GOP stalwarts that something might be just a little off about their so-called candidate. (Not because they actually think there's anything wrong with his "locker-room banter," so much as the dim realization that over half the voting population is, you know, female. Trump's response? Repeal the 19th Amendment.)

This is not Reality TV; this is supposed to be Presidential politics.Those thundering hoofbeats you hear is the stampede of party leaders trying to distance themselves from the Trump debacle while they still can.

It's not news that their candidate is an unrepentant sleazebag, an "octopus" (albeit small-handed) who drools all over pretty women like Kujo. Why are party leaders and supporters surprised? Why didn't the GOP quit him months ago?

Because they kept hoping to sway his nutball "base" back to their own agenda. Ha! As if Trump cared about anyone's agenda but his own. He wants to promote himself as a rich "celebrity," because then he can "get away with" groping unwilling women and paying off debts with lawsuits. All he wants to do is win this horse race, a goal that grows more laughable every hour.

The GOP is the horse he rode in on. The disastrous Trump campaign is going down in flames, and now it threatens to take the whole party with it. And it couldn't happen to a more deserving bunch of folks.