Donald Trump's Unbelievable Candidacy: Its 15 Seconds Are Just About Up

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

It's incredible. Unbelievable. That Trump presidential bid is going big, baby -- as in the biggest, fastest collapse of a candidacy in history. Oh yeah.

From Public Policy Polling:

Donald Trump has had one of the quickest rises and falls in the history of Presidential politics. Last month we found him leading the Republican field with 26%. In the space of just four weeks he's dropped all the way down to 8%, putting him in a tie for fifth place with Ron Paul.

Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney are at the top of the GOP race with 19% and 18% respectively. Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin are further back at 13% and 12%, followed by Trump and Paul at 8%, Michele Bachmann at 7%, and Tim Pawlenty at 5%.

As Trump got more and more exposure over the last month Republicans didn't just decide they weren't interested in having him as their nominee- they also decided they flat don't like him. Only 34% of GOP voters now have a favorable opinion of Trump to 53% who view him in a negative light.

Maybe this is why Trump was on Fox last night with Martha MacCallum and complained bitterly about how he's being treated in the press. Apparently, it's bad for the country to criticize great leaders like Donald Trump, even when they make utter buffoons of themselves by trumpeting easily disproven conspiracy theories:

MACCALLUM: ...You know, when you go home at night and you talk to your wife and you think about all this, how does get -- this hammering, in your words, how does that get factored into the decision?

TRUMP: Well, I think it's very bad for the country. And it doesn't affect my decision because I think I have a pretty thick skin. But I think it's very bad for the country because the kind of people -- and I'm not talking about myself, I'm talking about generally speaking. The kind of person you need to run this country has to be somebody that really has accomplished a lot because he's got to accomplish -- he or she has to accomplish a lot for the country.

The guy is so completely out to lunch that his Republican fans are fleeing him in droves. Ah, Donald, we hardly knew ye. Because there was so little to know.

Makes you wonder why the hell Trump got trotted out for public consumption in the first place. And then I remembered: He was always a stalking horse who'd make the rest of the Republican presidential field look sane and intelligent by comparison.

That, and he had one other good use. Eric Boehlert caught this one a couple of weeks ago, when Andrea Tantaros told some accidental truth on O'Reilly's show:

Let the man speak. He's got a bigger megaphone than Romney, Pawlenty, Gingrich, than all of them combined. And you know what; he can drive up Obama's negatives more than any of the other of those GOP candidates.

Sure. He can self-immolate like the flaming gasbag he is on his own good time. But what he may have done instead is accidentally drive up Obama's positives: They got one look at a real comparison between the two men last week, and it wasn't even a contest.