The White House is predicting 9% unemployment throughout 2012 – and when Obama Care takes effect in 2014 expect it to go even higher.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 2, 2011

Remember the good old days when the Republican Party used racism as seasoning, not the whole meal?

The GOP power brokers have long used the coded language of exclusion to seal the deal with white Americans whom they assumed were mainly present for their policies. But Donald Trump, who made the asinine prediction above about Obamacare in 2011, actually says now he approves of most of the key tenets of the Affordable Care Act. In fact, he sometimes can actually be to the Left of what the Obama Administration accomplished. It wasn’t Obama’s legislation that was actually a prickly problem, then what was besides partisanship and the President’s race? It wasn’t that the suit was too tan but the skin.

Trump’s not really selling any conservative policies, and I’m sure evangelicals aren’t buying his bible-salesman bullshit. What he has to offer is the unvarnished language of bigotry and anti-immigration. He seems mostly to have risen because of his stab in the dark that there a large amount of white Americans who really miss being able to use racial slurs without consequences. So many Trump voters have said in entrance and exit polls they like him because he “tells it like it is.” But he never does. He just says hateful, prejudiced things. The coded language has shifted from the leader to the followers.

From “Trump’s Hostile Takeover Gains Pace,” by Edward Luce of the Financial Times:

Much like Donald Trump, facts are stubborn things. No Republican has ever won both New Hampshire and South Carolina and failed to win the nomination. Yet two earth-shattering victories later, swaths of the Republican establishment continue to think Mr Trump will prove an exception to that rule.

As it happens, they thought his campaign would implode six months ago. The last to know are always those in charge. This is how C-suites react to hostile bids. First there is denial. Then anger. Then bargaining. Eventually they succumb to depression.

In the case of Mr Trump, Republicans might as well jump straight to the latter. It is hard to overstate how emphatically the party’s rank and file have repudiated their leaders in the past two weeks

It is likely to get worse. On Tuesday, Mr Trump will almost certainly sweep Nevada, according to the polls. A week later most of the Bible Belt will vote in the Super Tuesday primaries on March 1 that will select a huge slate of delegates. With almost three-quarters of voters declaring themselves evangelical, South Carolina was about as biblical as a primary could be.

Not only did Mr Trump win 43 per cent of evangelical voters, according to exit polls. He won many more than his scripture-quoting rival, Ted Cruz. The portents for Texas, the most important state on Super Tuesday, look ominous.

To underline, the overtly Christian Mr Cruz lost hands down among socially conservative voters to a thrice-married, Pope-insulting, profanity-spewing, casino-owning mogul from New York.•