Art of the Con: Why Trump's the best thing that ever happened to GOP

I didn't watch much TV or follow too much news during my short mini-vacation last week, but on Wednesday night before bed I checked in briefly on MSNBC's "Last Word" with Lawrence O'Donnell, just  to make sure I hadn't missed any truly shocking headlines. And in fact, I was shocked by what I saw, although it was hardly what I'd consider news. Almost the entire show was devoted to one presidential candidate: The bombastic, xenophobic, crass, frequently dishonest Republican billionaire Donald Trump.

It was almost a half-hour into the show, and I wondered what else was going on on the world. (Had Greece's government suddenly found a cache of buried treasure to end its life-of-death financial crisis?) "When we come back," O'Donnell solemnly intoned, "our panel will discuss the latest developments with Donald Trump!" At the bottom of the screen was the chyron that MSNBC, CNN, and Fox News now use 23 1/2 hours a day to scream "BREAKING NEWS," usually when nothing of the sort is occurring. The current crisis: Republican national chairman Reince Priebus had allegedly phoned Trump to plead with the $8.7 Billion Man (probably another lie, FWIW) to tone down his outrageous Mexican-bashing campaign.

I'm so old I remember when Donald Trump was going to save the USFL (spoiler alert: he didn't), not America. But now -- a month before the first debate, six months before the Iowa caucuses, and almost 17 months before America picks our 45th president -- the short-fingerted vulgarian hasn't just sucked all of the oxygen out of the 2016 presidential race, but has shattered a few windows from the ensuing vacuum.

Liberals are clucking that Trump's arrival is the greatest thing to hit the Iowa caucuses since deep-fried corn dogs, that his unvarnished appeals to not-so-soft bigotry -- implying that arrivals from Mexico are criminals and rapists, tweeting and then deleting nasty talk about Jeb (Jeb!) Bush's Mexican-born wife Columba -- are revealing the former Party of Lincoln as a hot, racist mess. The media -- already chafing at the notion that 2016 would be a coronation for the tightly wound, tightly controlled, reporter-corralling Hillary Clinton -- is beside itself with glee. A Donald Trump "exclusive" media interview as about as rare as a stink bug in July, and they come before CNN or MSNBC or Fox News can remove the hyperbolic chyron -- "Trump: Somebody's Doing the Raping"  -- from the last "exclusive" interview.

And, the conventional wisdom goes, the GOP leadership is apoplectic. Priebus and other top party brass are said to be concerned that Trump's comments may kill any hope that Republicans have of winning back Latino voters in 2016 -- even if he's just verbalizing what the Tea Party base of the party is thinking, in the blunt language they prefer. Lindsey Graham, one of the 2 or 3 "moderates" on immigration among the Republicans' Not-So-Sweet 16, hit the panic button today, stating: that if they party doesn't repudiate Trump, "We will have lost the moral authority, in my view, to govern this great nation."

The only think I can add to that is....wake up, everybody.

You're being jobbed. The man who wrote "The Art of the Deal" in the 1990s is back to teach us the art of the con, and this one's a blockbuster.

I don't think it's a conscious plot -- top Republicans just aren't that smart... and neither are Democrats. But I do think Trump actually is a savior, not of America but of the GOP's faltering ambitions to re-capture the White House and restore the Bush family dynasty. When Priebus and Co., are leaking to the Times and the Post that they've urged Trump to tone down the rhetoric, what they're really doing is updating a classic kids' fable: Don't throw us in the briar patch!

Think about the debates, which begin next month. The 2012 dog-and-pony-show-turned-clown-circus was an unmitigated disaster for Republicans -- an orgy of science denial and let-him-die health care plans. The 2016 debates will be Donald Trump -- and nine statesmen (sorry, Carly, who hasn't made the cut)...in comparison, anyway.

The script is already written. The salivating cable moderator will ask Trump in the first 10 minutes about Mexico and rapists or what not, and The Donald will launch into his routine. The reply will certainly fall upon Jeb! -- serious and well-spoken, fluent in Spanish, husband and father of Latino-Americans, and he will utter a well-crafted response that will, in essence, be the 21st Century version of, "Have you, at long last, no sense of decency." And the pundits will go wild, declaring the scripted reply to be historic -- the where's-the-beef-no-Jack-Kennedy-Army-McCarthy moment that made John Ellis Bush "a leader."

What's actually historic is this: Jeb Bush may be the least popular figure with the best chance of becoming president in the 239 years of the American experience. One of the two GOP candidates with near-perfect name ID has hovered in the polls at 15 percent of the minority party -- partly because most Americans get that this country was founded to prevent dynastic rule, not foster it. But he's running against 14 candidates evenly splitting most of the rest of the vote, and against Trump, who'll surely implode whenever he leaves his current wife for Miss Teenage America or gets a better reality-TV deal from Spike! TV or some such fiasco. And Bush's role in slaying the Trump "monster" will make him a moderate hero to TV's fickle talking heads, and he could even surge past his rival dynastic heir, Hillary Clinton.

That's the biggest part of the con, because Jeb! Bush is hardly a moderate. He governed Florida in a severely conservative fashion, with the usual mix of tax cuts for the rich and fire and brimstone on stem cell research and keeping Terri Schiavo alive against her husband's wishes, with the worst of corporate ed reform and climate denial thrown in for good measure. Reince Priebus and Friends don't want you talking about that, nor about the $29 million that Jeb! earned for...what exactly does he do, again?

True, their initial choice was to keep the party's over-the-top xenophobia hidden away in the attic, but the better way to deal with a political virus is to bring it out in the open and -- since killing this germ may be impossible -- at least tamping down the symptoms. Trump's over-the-top racism is the vehicle for Priebus and Bush to do exactly that.

Indeed, at least in the short term, everybody wins! Trump gets the kind of eternal fame that only $8.7 (or $4.1) billion can buy. The GOP gets its straw man so that Bush the "moderate" hero can slay before a grateful public's eyes. The media gets what it's craved for the last two decades, a real-time political reality show that would make the Kardashians cringe. And the Democrats get to re-live one of their most common experiences in most even-numbered years: Self-delusion.

Of course, there is one loser here, the American voter. Because the other impact of Trump sucking the air out of 2016 is that he is absolutely strangling whatever hope there was of even a muted conversation about the real, actual issues -- not the Donald J. Trump Memorial Border Fence but how millions of Americans can't afford college tuitions with kids are staring at an ocean of debt, or  how to reach the folks who still haven't been reached with affordable health care insurance, or how the so-called "American Dream" slips further from 99 percent of folks.

Of course, one candidate actually is talking about these things -- Bernie Sanders. So far, TV's Sanders' coverage has been 50 percent, "Look at the size of that crowd!," 20 percent, "Don't forget he's a socialist," and 30 percent "Now back  to our panel on Donald Trump!" The smart money -- the other billionaires who quietly finance the election, who are perfectly fine with either Jeb! or Hillary! -- is loving the Trump reality show, running out the 2016 clock before "real issues" gets a chance to clear its throat. Maybe Trump actually got one thing right. Somebody is doing the raping.