Watching a campaign ad on TV for a Republican candidate for Congress in a district close to mine I think: “what sort of idiots does he take us for?” 

Because the ad has the 1994 and 2010 themes - I’m one of you, a responsible Conservative who will fight for family values, a balanced budget and eliminate government waste.

Oh, please.

Fool me once shame on you.  Fool me twice shame on me. What is it the third time around?  Proof that we’re as dumb as a box of rocks?

John Kennedy once said that there’s always some people who don’t get the word and this candidate as well as I suspect, many other establishment hopefuls in both parties, prove the point.  It’s maybe what Ted Cruz’s candidacy proves.  That not enough people understand that, love him or hate him, the Trump phenomenon is showing us in both Technicolor and Surround Sound that the Republican Party is being dragged kicking and screaming and sobbing into reconfiguring itself.  Almost in the fashion in which the Democratic Party of segregation and the “solid south” transmogrified into the party of Civil Rights and Welfare largess under LBJ. 

Indeed, whether Trump prevails or not, he has shown us that there is a tremendous appetite in the rank and file (of both parties, in fact) for a wholesale repudiation of the elite philosophy of political correctness, crony political business and banking deals financed with tax money, porous borders, the war on police, national handwringing in front of foreign leaders and what William Buckley once described (in the negative sense) as the utility of pressure groups.

So I dunno.  I made one foray in a local election long ago and got whupped, but if I were running for Congress today, I wouldn’t go with the “I’ll balance the budget” or “family values” dodge.  Instead I’d slam college presidents who give into demands to restrict free speech (there are a lot of them to throw a rock at - especially where I live), drive home the idea that both Blacks and White need jobs not transgender access to public restrooms of their choice, suggest that U.S. Army Special Forces and Navy SEALS start assassinating the drug cartel members in their fortified headquarter compounds just over the border in Mexico, pound the lectern about abolishing the EPA or the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, which has (so I understand) over five hundred lawyers busy with the ridiculous like suing schools who haven’t invented a Kindle for blind students.  I’d promise to outlaw ballots in any other language than English, forbid the import of firearms from nations who didn’t afford their citizens the right to own and bear arms and start using certain banned phrases like “cowboys and Indians.”

And last but not least insist that the new president take the oath of office with a bust of Churchill under his arm and refuse to enter the White House until an experienced exorcist gave the all clear.

In other words, I’d stay ahead of the curve.

And have an awful lot of fun.

Maybe as much as Trump.

Richard F. Miniter is the author of The Things I Want Most, Random House, BDD See it Here.  He lives and writes in the colonial era hamlet of Stone Ridge, New York, blogs here and can also be reached at miniterhome@gmail.com