Nate Silver of fivethirtyeight, whose predictions are uncannily accurate, tells us to stop freaking out about Trump's poll numbers.  It's too soon to tell.

If Trump has not harmed his numbers with all of his outlandish statements, then how can he fade?

In reply, Silver writes:

One problem with this is that it’s not enough for Trump to merely avoid fading. Right now, he has 25 to 30 percent of the vote in polls among the roughly 25 percent of Americans who identify as Republican. (That’s something like 6 to 8 percent of the electorate overall, or about the same share of people who think the Apollo moon landings were faked.) As the rest of the field consolidates around him, Trump will need to gain additional support to win the nomination.

He adds that those votes are fluid:

But there’s another, more fundamental problem.  That 25 or 30 percent of the vote isn’t really Donald Trump’s for the keeping.  In fact, it doesn’t belong to any candidate.  If past nomination races are any guide, the vast majority of eventual Republican voters haven’t made up their minds yet.

He closes with the warning for Trump lovers and loathers that it's too soon to tell:

So, could Trump win? We confront two stubborn facts: first, that nobody remotely like Trump has won a major-party nomination in the modern era.⁴And second, as is always a problem in analysis of presidential campaigns, we don’t have all that many data points, so unprecedented events can occur with some regularity. For my money, that adds up to Trump’s chances being higher than 0 but (considerably) less than 20 percent. Your mileage may vary. But you probably shouldn’t rely solely on the polls to make your case; it’s still too soon for that.

Of course, Silver has charts and line graphs. 

His analysis follows common sense.  It doesn't add up, for me at least, as I read the GOP primary voters, that Trump will get the nomination.  But he will likely cause election chaos at the convention in June or in November – or both.

James Arlandson's website is liveasfreepeople.wordpress.com, which is updated almost daily and where he has posted pieces about Carson, Cruz, and Trump.