What\'s to do with Donald Trump now?

By now Donald Trump must be very allergic to numbers because in all polls on the US presidential election, and there are so many, the prediction about his chances of winning is very pessimistic. In polls nationally, Hillary Clinton has increased her lead to nearly double digit. More importantly, she is leading Donald Trump in the key swing states. The feeling that has emerged out of these polls is that Hillary Clinton may be headed for a landslide.
The Republicans themselves and Donald Trump himself are the reasons for this feeling. The Republican Party is sharply divided against its own candidate. Every day, with the declining numbers of Donald Trump, there is news in the media about how many top Republicans have gone public and openly stated what the Democrats should be doing; telling voters not to vote for the Republican Party's candidate because he is unfit to be the President of America!
CNN's website in its update a week ago has seven sitting Republican Senators coming out publicly and stating that they would not vote for their party's candidate. In the list, there are seven members of the House and five Republican Governors who, like the Senators, also stated in the media that they would not vote for Trump. There are scores of top party leaders including former Republican Presidents, father and son Bush, and the party's presidential nominee for 2012 Mitt Romney who have also opposed him publicly.
The reason why these Republicans have come out against their party's candidate is as important as the timing. These leaders wanted to send a very important message that Trump by the way he has conducted himself on the campaign trail has unequivocally flagged for Americans that he does not have the temperament to be their President and it would be dangerous to place the fate of the country in the hands of such an unstable man.
The timing is unbelievable as it says a lot about Trump. In the past, the two parties have been on their best behaviour in showing the nation how united they are behind their respective candidates. In fact, to do the contrary, as the Republicans are doing with Trump, defeats both reason and logic. With less than three months left before the election, these Republicans are really ensuring the cause of the Democrats, which is to defeat Trump and send Hillary Clinton to the White House.
That some of the top Republicans are doing such a thing would, under normal circumstances, have led to charges of betraying the party. But these are not normal times in the US political history and Donald Trump is no normal candidate. Thus the Republicans, who are openly working to defeat the party's candidate, are not being seen as betraying the party's cause or for that matter, putting their own names and credibility on the line. And for that, Trump is almost totally responsible.
Donald Trump entered the race as an outsider. In fact, he made his being an outsider his main qualification for the party's ticket. He called a political insider as one, who is part of Washington's 'political correctness' that he argued successfully is synonymous for a corrupt political system and the main cause for the dire economic predicament of the country's very large blue collar workers and also the middle class and the poor.
Thereafter, he lost his plot. He may have correctly hit the jackpot with the predicament of the blue-collar workers/middle class and the poor but he failed to come out with policies for breaking Washington's 'political correctness' for the benefit of these classes who collectively could have taken him over the line in the race for the White House. Instead, he opted for a campaign based on hatred, bigotry and insults because he found that these steps brought to his rallies people in huge numbers that with the hype from the media, made it appear like his campaign had caught fire!
The media and Donald Trump of course, erred fundamentally with that assumption. Both thought that the huge crowds in his rallies represented the nation. As the quintessential entertainer with a humungous ego, Trump needed new ideas to be the star of the presidential election. Thus when the attraction of insulting the Muslims, blacks, Hispanics and women started to lose its value in pulling huge crowds and keeping them on the edge of their seats, he crossed the red line of what, on a bipartisan basis, is considered sacrosanct. He picked up the feud with the Star Family of the Khans and insulted his wife that became too much for the nation outside his base of extreme right and the white supremacists to take. The nation was aghast.
When the dust on the 2016 election settles, Donald Trump's feud with the Khans will be seen as the defining moment of his campaign that sent him sliding towards a political disaster. Thereafter, his campaign has gone from the weird to the bizarre. His threat to Hillary Clinton over the Second Amendment and following that with calling the President of the country, the founder of ISIS, have been too much for his own party to digest. The party leaders that had been praying and hoping that after the Convention, their candidate would pivot towards the national electorate, saw their prayers going down the drain with his latest bizarre statements on the election trail.
Thus, in desperation, 70 top Republicans addressed a letter to the RNC Chairman Reince Priebus urging him to cut off funds for Donald Trump's campaign and direct those to the Senate/House elections because they feel winning the presidency would now be impossible. They wrote that 'Donald Trump's divisiveness, recklessness, incompetence, and record-breaking unpopularity risk turning this election into a Democratic landslide, and only the immediate shift of all available RNC resources to vulnerable Senate and House races will prevent the GOP from drowning with a Trump-emblazoned anchor around its neck…Donald Trump's chances of being elected president are evaporating by the day.'
Donald Trump is of course totally oblivious to these developments. His priority is now to establish the media as 'crooked' instead of Hillary Clinton. He believes that the media is 'out to get him' and while he is leading 20 per cent nationally, misreporting the facts. To divert attention and win national attention in his favour, he stated that his administration would introduce 'extreme vetting' in countries where radical Islam thrives to stop potential radical Islamic elements from entering the country. He did not explain how the 'extreme vetting' would work to combat ISIS terror. The Democrats were quick to point out its hollowness for many obvious reasons. It was very easy for them to establish that Donald Trump and his close associates would badly fail in the vetting tests. For one, the vetting is intended to weed out religious bigots and who is a better bigot than Donald Trump?
Meanwhile, Trump's campaign manager Paul Manafort who had tried to pivot him towards the national constituencies has been exposed for accepting US$ 12 million from ousted and thoroughly corrupt Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovychwho now in exile in Russia. Donald Trump has recruited Kellyanne Conway and Stephen Bannon in his place. Stephen Bannon has no experience in running a race while Kellyanne Conway had worked with Ted Cruz. Both represent the mindset that had made Donald Trump a phenomenon in the primaries, a populist demagogue who did not care about issues and policies.
Thus the choice of the two makes little sense where Donald Trump needs to pivot towards the national constituencies to bridge the 15 per cent  gap between where he stands now and where he needs to go to win. Together with these strange changes, he is calling for 'regime change' like his campaign in a Third World dictatorship! In all of these bizarre developments, 'extreme vetting' may be seen as a scaling down by Donald Trump from his demand to ban all Muslims from entering the United States.
The writer is a retired Ambassador.
 ambserajulislam @gmail.com