Donald Trump is a tin-pot dictator wannabe with verbal diarrhea, and if you consider his steady McDonald’s-and-Häagen-Dazs diet, most likely the non-verbal kind as well.

His campaign now resembles one of his tottering Atlantic City casinos, where the house never wins, and despite the candidate’s braggadocio about his supposed billions and self-financing abilities, he’s already desperate for a daddy to buy millions of dollars worth of chips and help him stave off ruin. Since he’s the presumptive Republican nominee and anything can happen, perhaps the emotional homunculus falls ass-backwards into the Oval Office and not only the GOP but the whole country experiences a death in the gutter, but the more likely outcome sees the hideous hotelier flailing wildly to keep from drowning until he’s finally flushed down the vortex.

Excerpts from two pieces follow: 1) The great Charles P. Pierce’s latest caustic, take-no-prisoners wit at Esquire Politics, and 2) Mark Leibovich’s New York Times article about Trump perhaps swallowing the GOP whole as if it were the final french fry.

From Pierce:

The campaign spent $208,000 on its signature Make America Great hats, which may well go down as the Trump campaign’s only lasting contribution to the political history of the Republic. Laugh, clown, laugh.

(Also, note to people covering this campaign. He, Trump is not the first guy to benefit from the phenomenon of voters who believe he is above corruption because he’s rich. Up in the Commonwealth—God save it!—people voted for generation after generation of wealthy WASPs for that very reason.)

The obvious solution is for the Republican Party to throw He, Trump overboard and nominate somebody else, even if the somebody else is Tailgunner Ted Cruz. Nobody in the party likes him, but at least he’d get whipped in a more conventional campaign and, in the aftermath, the party could make the argument that it still had some measure of self-control and some semblance of self-discipline. But, thus far, the Never Trump effort hasn’t shown any more evidence of corporeal form than the Trump campaign has. It’s hard to see these people getting this together a little more than a month before a convention that already is looking like a Category-5 shitstorm.

(However, Apple CEO Tim Cook is planning to host a fundraiser for non-candidate Paul Ryan, the zombie-eyed granny-starver from the state of Wisconsin, so some folks are thinking ahead.)

Given these numbers, and given that very high probability that He, Trump is probably bullshitting completely about his plans to “self-fund” the general election, the Not Funny part of the news is the fact that, if Trump can’t or won’t fund a proper campaign, somebody totally outside the bounds of political accountability will step up and do it. Personally, I’d rather He, Trump spending himself into the poorhouse than have a candidate who owes his very survival to someone like angry renegade hobbit Sheldon Adelson.•

From Leibovich:

“Priebus” is a German name, pronounced like the Toyota Prius with a “b” stuck in the middle. Reince (short for Reinhold, rhymes with “pints”) is 44 but has an older-man’s vibe. He is often underslept, has the beginnings of jowls and tiny goose pimples clustered under his eyes like those on the belly of a toad. He speaks in the slow and slightly put-upon manner of an adolescent whose parents are always hassling him about the nightmare house guest. The Trump issue, in other words. It’s never far from anything, and really, these days, what else is there?

Plenty, Priebus kept trying to convince me. The Republican Party had its own distinct identity and principles and points of pride. It controls both chambers of Congress and holds more federal and statewide seats than at any time since 1900, he said. What keeps eluding Republicans is the White House. They have lost the popular vote in five of the last six national elections. “Cultural elections,” Priebus calls them — “the big ones.” A chief reason for this is that many voters dismiss Republicans as being culturally and demographically stuck in 1900. It was Priebus who commissioned and endorsed the findings of the G.O.P. “autopsy” after Mitt Romney’s defeat in 2012. Formally christened as the “Growth and Opportunity Project,” the report warned that the G.O.P. was “increasingly marginalizing itself” to a point where it would be “increasingly difficult for Republicans to win another presidential election in the near future.” That is, the report concluded, unless the party expanded its aging white base to include more immigrants, ethnic minorities and women, precisely the groups the next likely standard-bearer has so splendidly repelled.
 
Priebus refers to himself as a “party guy.” He spent much of his youth in Kenosha, Wis., organizing pizza parties for Republican volunteers, putting up yard signs and listening to Newt Gingrich speeches on cassettes in his car — party-guy things. His first date with his future wife included a trip to a Republican Lincoln Day dinner, an evening sexed up by the presence of two Republican congressmen: James Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin and Henry Hyde of Illinois. Being a “party guy” can come off sounding a little old-school nerdy, like being a ham-radio guy. But Priebus speaks of this identity with sincere pride, and his allegiance is clear: to “the party,” not any one nominee.

Still, our meetings sometimes took on the feel of therapy sessions, with Priebus playing the role of the betrayed spouse trying to convince me that his tormentor really could change. Trump would soon be “pivoting” into a more “presidential” mode, Priebus kept promising. But after a while it became clear that Trump’s outrages would continue unabated.•