Like rap music and The Simpsons, the celebrity real-estate mogul Donald Trump, who burst onto the scene looking like a six-weeks’ fad in the 1980s, still has the look of a six-weeks’ fad 30-some-odd years later. Clearly the doubters’ assumptions need to be reexamined. Straight Outta Compton shows a rising generation enraptured with rap, Bart and Lisa have been on the air longer than Gunsmoke, and the Donald looks like an increasingly plausible candidate for the presidency of the United States.

The polls have been nothing short of tremendous,” Trump told an overflow crowd at a convention center here on August 25. This was not one of his exaggerations. When Trump declared for the Republican nomination in June, few news outlets paid attention. But his crude and colorful attacks on illegal immigration turned the primary into a spectacle, and were responsible for making the first Republican debate the most-watched nonsports event in the history of cable TV. Now an Ipsos poll shows Trump running at 32 percent among Republicans nationally, twice as popular as runner-up Jeb Bush. The arrival of savvy campaign operatives in Iowa and New Hampshire has brought organizational sinew to his effort. A CNN poll has Trump running only 6 points behind Hillary Clinton among all voters — a better showing than the supposedly mainstream alternative, Bush.

Read the article “Why Trump is Defying Pundits’ Expectations” on weeklystandard.com.