STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. – It's what we've always wanted, isn't it? A totally unscripted White House race? No more predictable politics as usual?
If nothing else, Donald Trump has at least given us that.
He may not be the best person for the job, but Trump has saved us from the play-it-safe, poll-driven, stage-managed, social media-drenched tedium that passes for presidential politics. And in an era where White House campaign cycles have gotten longer and longer, and ever more vacuous, we can be thankful for that.
Even better: The political ruling elite can't stand it.
Trump, of course, was supposed to have been long gone by now. If you listened to the pundits, the Trump for President effort wasn't supposed to have gotten off the ground at all. Trump was a buffoon, a cartoon. A blowhard. A TV huckster. A soulless 1-percenter.
And that hair.
He wasn't even qualified to get in the ring.
But Trump not only ran, he became the favorite on the GOP side, and is gaining on Hillary in head-to-head polls. He has owned this presidential summer.
Along the way, he's had more lives than Rasputin.
Trump was supposed to be dead when he snarled about illegal Mexican immigrant rapists and thieves. But his poll numbers continued to rise.
He was supposed to be toast when he bashed Vietnam War hero John McCain. Nope. Trump went right on surging.
It was going to be a Waterloo when Trump took part in the first GOP presidential debate on Fox News. He would surely fold in the company of all those experienced pols and debaters.
But Trump was the star that night, the reason why many people tuned in. His ongoing battle with Fox host Megyn Kelly has done him no harm. And why should it? It's just one rich, well-coiffed TV celebrity going up against another.
The funnest part of all this has been watching Hillary Clinton, Jeb Bush and the rest trying to appropriate little pieces of Trump's damn-the-torpedoes, "straight talk" shtick while not tipping all the way over into Crazyland.
Hillary pokes fun at her email foibles by cracking wise about self-vaporizing messages on Snapchat. And Jeb has been out there shaking his finger at "anchor babies."
But they can't do it, because they've got too much to lose, they want the job too badly. Their whole lives have led up to this moment. They can't take too many chances.
Trump, meanwhile, has already won and has nothing to lose. If he's not elected president, he'll go back to his billions, however many he actually has. His presidential run will make for a great reality series. His brand will be more valuable than ever. New business opportunities are no doubt already raining down on him.
American culture and politics are all about money and celebrity, and Trump's got both.
Trump has also been a Great Unifier. He has the professional pundits and the career pols, on both sides of the aisle, making palaver with each other as they try to figure out how to stop Trump in his tracks while at the same time trying to divine the secrets of his political success.
Suddenly, the Beltway pols and the pundits have a lot in common: We can't let Trumpwin, can we? If nothing else, it's proven that they're all part of the same hypocrisy, Michael Corleone would say. They have been exposed. It's been particularly entertaining to watch.
There is no playbook here. Nobody planned on the Trump Factor, so there's no way to counter it. This isn't how Jeb and Hillary drew it up. The TV talking heads spent months telling each other that the Trump Surge wasn't happening, and now that Trump has legs, they have no Plan B, except to try and goad Joe Biden into the race.
