Eventually, even billionaires grow bored with making money and look for more meaningful pursuits. For Bill Gates, it’s fighting disease in Africa; for George Soros, it’s kindling civic freedom in closed societies. To find Donald Trump, you have to slide considerably further down the social utility scale, to reality TV and, now, tea party demagoguery.
Is Trump a serious candidate? That’s an easy one: No. If he runs it will be to provide comic relief, which may be superfluous given the Republican Party’s already motley collection of odd, extreme and improbable presidential aspirants.
A tougher question: are Republicans a serious political party? That America’s vulgarian-in-chief can so easily vault to the top of early polling suggests a fatal GOP weakness for noisy celebrity over political substance.
