Donald Trump’s Big Show: Get Ready for Wild Conspiracy Theorists and Pistol-Packin’ Bikers

CLEVELAND—No sooner had word broken in news reports that three police officers were shot to death Sunday morning in Baton Rouge, La., than Republican presidential nominee apparent Donald J. Trump did what a brave man does: He took to social media to declare himself the “law and order candidate.” The reason for the shootings, Trump proclaimed, was a “lack of leadership" —a taunt aimed at President Barack Obama.

Trump’s good buddy, Alex Jones, the far-right conspiracy theorist whose InfoWars radio show Trump has frequented, attributed the shootings to “Obama-sponsored terrorists.”

Before you yell at me for alleging guilt by association, consider that on Monday in Cleveland, as the Republican National Convention gets underway here, Jones, together with Republican political operative Roger Stone, will host an “America First Unity Rally” — and that Trump has lauded Jones for his “amazing” reputation. (Well, that wasn’t exactly a lie; it is a pretty amazing thing. Consider his Space Lizard riff on Obamacare.)

“I will not let you down,” Trump told Jones in a December appearance on the Space Lizard impersonator’s show. “You will be very, very impressed, I hope.”

As for the Monday rally, among the several organizations co-sponsoring the event — most of them recently convened pro-Trump groups such as Christians for Trump and Bikers for Trump — one, Eternal Sentry, was dumped after Media Matters exposed the antisemitic and racist rants on the white nationalist group’s website. 

But when it comes to leadership and this love for police officers that Trump so often professes, his leadership was nowhere to be found when the Cleveland Police Department asked Ohio Governor John Kasich (who will not attend the GOP convention) to suspend the state’s open-carry gun laws in the city during the convention. Kasich said he couldn’t, and that was that.

Trump, of course, has made a big deal of his love for the NRA, waving the group’s endorsement of his candidacy before the Republican faithful at every opportunity. Okay, so the reality show star-turned-presidential candidate got into a little bit of trouble with NRA brass when, after the massacre at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Trump suggested things would have gone better inside the club if the patrons had been armed, but what’s a tiff between friends? Even the NRA doesn't think that drunk club goers should be carry and shooting guns. Everybody will likely feel better knowing that the Bikers for Trump at the America First rally have hinted that they’ll be packing.

It’ll Be Interesting

In a recent survey on the presidential election by the Pew Research Center, a majority of those polled rated the campaign as interesting, but not substantive. (Sort of like a reality TV show, one could argue.)

High levels of respondents belonging to or leaning toward each of the parties found the campaign engaging (77 percent in the general population, with those percentages pretty much holding among those identifying either Republican or Democrat). But only 65 percent overall felt that the issues that matter to them were being adequately addressed.

Yet the same survey found that Trump’s prospects for winning in the general election are far lower than Clinton’s. Asked to choose between the best known candidates, 45 percent said they would vote for Clinton, 36 percent for Trump and 11 percent for Libertarian Party candidate Gary Johnson.

And those lines are hard. Pew found very few who said they might still change their minds.

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Perhaps that’s why Trump seems increasingly desperate, telling CBS News’ "60 Minutes" that Clinton “invented ISIS” — perhaps the craziest whopper atop his pile of outlandish allegations — and failing to tack to the center now that he’s in the general election. 

There’s little doubt that Trump’s ratings will be astronomical during the Republican National Convention. Perhaps they’ll even yield him one of those short-lived bounces upward in the polls that conventions are wont to do for a presidential candidate. 

But it’s just as likely that viewers will be tuning in for the outrageous spectacle. Above all, Americans love to be entertained. We’re about to get quite a show.