Lord, whatever you need from me, please, make Donald Trump run for president.

The financial records, the divorces, the bankruptcies, the casinos, the real estate deals, the tenant lawsuits…it’s an opposition research team’s mother lode. Girlfriends, parties, clubs, lavish spending, high profile celebrity treatment…all fantastic stuff, except when you end up running for President. Just the hair alone is a campaign ad maker’s Orgasmatron.

I didn’t think it could get any better than Michelle Bachman and Sarah Palin actually running for President. But throw in Donald Trump, a carny in his own right, and the only things missing are sticky asphalt, generators, cheap prizes and the perfunctory stabbings.

Trump’s Howard Hughes-esque germ phobia and reluctance to shake hands ought to fit nicely into the pressing-the-flesh sessions with voters. Part of the citizenship obligation for all residents of New York City is to have enemies, but The Donald ought to have enough to fill Yankee Stadium. High stakes financial gamesmanship and deals, deals, deals, and there are guaranteed to be multitudes claiming they got the shaft. And maybe worst of all, he lives on the Upper East Side.

Silver Spoon Donnie may have a fortune, but it’s going to cost him a fortune to set up a full-blown presidential campaign operation with its multitude of staffers, consultants, fund-raisers, state and local headquarters, polls, media outlays and endless travel. And no matter how much dough he has personally, running for president in 2012 America means spending not millions, but perhaps a billion, meaning Donald is going to have to spend ceaseless hours begging donors for money. I don’t see him cottoning much to prostrating himself before other rich folks and begging for cash. But he’ll have to if he runs for President.

And inheritance and showmanship (I use this term as a synonym for a willingness without shame to do anything whatsoever for publicity’s sake) aside, I don’t see Donald as a terribly bright man. In fact, he’s going to be a human gaffe machine. Republican primary voters can’t get enough gutter talk and vicious calumny directed at President Obama. But mainstream voters, and especially independents absolutely detest that sort of thing.

And in long campaigns bilious blowhards tend not to wear well. A good, consistent stump speech is highly beneficial.  But running shtick, and the same shtick day after day and you’re risking Charlie Sheen-category annoyance on the Richter Scale.

You don’t get to keep many secrets once you declare for President. And if there’s one thing rich celebrities hate it’s spilling the beans; and transparency is going to come especially hard for a shady, egomaniacal tool like Donald Trump. Following the intramural guidelines Republican candidates use with one another, and unfortunately with the rest of humanity, the remainder of the pack will light into him like a pack of hungry hyenas.

The mere fact that the Trumps, Bachmans and Palins of the world are even considering, much less publicly broaching the real possibility of running for president on the Republican side is an indication Republicans’ current list of hopefuls and expected hopefuls is one of the most uninspired roll outs of crappy presidential merchandise in the history of retail politics. Not only that, this being the Republican Party, we still don’t know how many more nuts will fall out of the tree and run before the thing is over. Can you say, “Alan Keyes”?

We’re in for some Oxford Union quality debating spectacles under the Republican Big Top this year, the issues including but not limited to Obama’s Kenyan birth, the phony theory of evolution, the global warming con and many, many more. It’ll be the shootout at the Duh-Kay Corral.

Of course, what’s tragic for the Republican Party is high hilarity for all the rest of us in the reality based community, continuing, unlike the Republican Dark-Seekers, to sustain our long-maintained relationship with civilization.

 

UPDATE:

Speaking of more nuts falling out of the Republican tree, news came today that former Senator Rick Santorum is forming an exploratory committee for the 2012 presidential election. Not simply a nut, he falls out of the tree a fully-baked fruitcake. He’s notable for such accomplishments as introducing the possibility in 2005 of congressional intervention in the Terry Schiavo case, the legal drama surrounding a woman in a permanent vegetative state in Florida, whose husband’s decision to pull the plug according to his wife’s previous wishes caused the far right to have a hissy fit. Besides being pompous, sanctimonious and extreme, his views on social issues are somewhere between the Pope’s and a Puritan witch burner’s.

He’s going to fit in with the rest of the 2012 Republican crop just dandy. Keep ‘em coming, Lord.