How many political insiders do you know who are opposed to Barack Obama and his nefarious works — IRS abuses, corporate bribes, climate fantasies, bailouts for Iran, importing saboteurs — yet save their peak agitation for Donald Trump, a presidential candidate they say “can’t” be nominated?

If it “can’t” happen, why sputter to the point of apoplexy? Perhaps because “it” is being defined too conventionally.

Let’s try a different lens: Trump’s terrain-shifting methods fit the Hostile Takeover Playbook. The rules of corporate raiding are quite different from the ordinary rules of primary politics, and seem to fit the mood of over a third of the Republican rank-and-file, who favor Trump over his primary rivals and over the timid “Directors” they sent to Congress to stop the Obama Onslaught. Seen in this light, what we’re watching is one heck of a Proxy Fight for “GOP Incorporated.”

(1) Trump is a long-suffering “shareholder” himself. He speaks of backing John McCain in 2008 and Mitt Romney in 2012. He described the latter as a competent golfer who starts to choke on the final three or four holes. Isn’t that the way one business guy sizes up another?

(2) His track record is pragmatic and opportunistic. Trump has backed candidates from the other party, including Hillary Clinton for Senator in 2000. Like classic corporate raiders Carl Icahn and T. Boone Pickens, he treats consistency as the hobgoblin of small minds. Lucky for him that many Republicans no longer see “ideological correctness” as Priority One.

(3) As of June 2015, the stage is set: He opens the Takeover Campaign by floodlighting an issue — one product line, one pulsating niche — starved for attention by the existing Management: Border Control, Sanctuary Cities and most graphically the violent crimes committed by illegals.

(4) Because every other presidential candidate except Ted Cruz has been evasive on that matter, Trump’s candidacy quickly gains critical mass, which grows further as he shows how to escape the boxes long used by Big Media to constrict Republican officeholders and policy options.

(5) As personal attacks arrive, he either flicks them off — e.g., handing out Lindsey Graham’s phone number — or responds with tactical nukes. Yes, the latter has made Trump look like a hypersensitive Tweet-monger. But such pinpoint aggression also shows he’s comfortable sustaining a battle. And it strongly indicates he won’t be a calculating controversy-dodger in 2016.

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Source: Frank Gregorsky, https://stream.org