It is too soon to declare Donald Trump the presumptive Republican nominee for US president. He has faced only a few weeks of unrestrained attacks from his rivals and fresh attacks may yet find their mark. It is not too soon, however, to declare the 2016 race for the White House an epic contest between insurgents and the establishment; nor to think seriously about an insurgent victory in November. Only a fool would confidently predict the outcome with eight months to go.
Mr Trump’s first task after announcing his candidacy was to show that he was serious. He accomplished that before the first primary votes were cast in Iowa. He had run for president before in 2000. But that was more to build his personal brand than to win. This time he saw more clearly than the rest of the Republican field that the 2008 financial crisis and eight years of timid leadership from President Obama had created a new constituency. This was a bloc of voters heartily sick of politics as usual and eager to embrace any amount of political incorrectness from someone they saw as brave enough to speak his mind.
As the final votes from Super Tuesday’s primaries were counted yesterday, Mr Trump’s dominance came into focus. He has won in 10 of the 15 states contested so far. His nearest rival, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, has won in four. Mr Trump leads in the all-important delegate count by only 316 to Senator Cruz’s 226, but the winner-takes-all format in the next big primaries on March 15 historically favours the frontrunner.
Many who fear Mr Trump and most of those who revere him say he is now unstoppable. He is not. He has daunting momentum but that could be slowed if senators Marco Rubio and John Kasich win in their home states of Florida and Ohio respectively. If all three senators stay in the race until their party’s convention in July and mount a concerted putsch, the Trump juggernaut could be derailed.
A more likely scenario is that he goes on winning, and he is already planning for it. “I’m becoming diplomatic,” the man who proposed banning Muslims from entering the US said in a victory speech delivered from his lavish Palm Beach residence on Tuesday night. “He is a unifier,” his supporter Chris Christie, the governor of New Jersey, said of the man who would keep out illegal immigrants with a Mexican border wall.
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Mr Trump was indeed unusually emollient in victory, but the idea that he can be diplomatic is about to be tested to the limit. A new poll suggests that only 27 per cent of those who voted on Tuesday were aware that he had hesitated to renounce the support of David Duke, the white supremacist former leader of the Ku Klux Klan. Senators Cruz and Rubio have promised to spend millions on attack ads filling such knowledge gaps in the next two weeks.
Whether they will have any impact is another matter. Mr Trump defies political gravity, and this rightly alarms Hillary Clinton. She cemented her frontrunner status for the Democrats on Tuesday, but she is tired, flawed and beatable, and she cannot know how far into the political centre ground Mr Trump’s appeal might spread. In the world’s most responsive democracy, he has responded quickest to voters’ mood of anger and impatience. If Mrs Clinton fails to respond in kind she will be trumped.