I GUESS THE RACE FOR THE GOP PRESIDENTIAL NOMINATION IS OVER

Ed Kilgore says Trump is soaring in the polls because the Republican base now has an insatiable hunger for red meat. David Frum responds:

... Americans who feel robbed and duped by the series of financial and economic disappointments and disasters from the dot-com bubble onward are boiling with rage against their financial and political leadership. Conservative Americans express that rage in terms learned from talk radio and Fox News. But the fact that these conservative voters express their rage by talking about "debt" and "taxes" does not mean that they want what K Street wants: a Ryan budget that cuts spending on people like them to finance tax cuts for people much richer than them. They are just using familiar words to express a new and unfamiliar emotion of betrayal and resentment. The GOP establishment has successfully directed those emotions against the Obama administration. But there's no guarantee that the emotions will remain fixed in that direction -- because after all, the establishment GOP is offering little or nothing to allay the discontents producing the anger. Conservatives like liberals have suffered unemployment, the loss of savings, the decline in housing values. Conservatives like liberals find themselves suddenly poorer for reasons they do not understand. Conservatives like liberals fear and dread that Medicare and Social Security will soon be cut to rescue the country's finances. If the GOP wants to finish Trump, GOP candidates had better learn to speak to those anxieties -- to offer a remedy more effectual than the snake-oil now being peddled by Tim Pawlenty.

"If the GOP wants to finish Trump, GOP candidates had better learn to speak to those anxieties" -- well, given that the likelihood of that is precisely zero, I guess we have our Republican presidential nominee for 2012:

Congratulations, Donald.