There actually is a strategy at work behind Trump...

[Archae]

And the stupid things he is saying.

The latest equating Jeb Bush's wife to an illegal.

Trump is the head clown, the buffoon, the jester, making noise and acting dumb so candidates like Scott Walker and Jeb Bush look more "Presidential."

I have no doubt others have pointed this out long before I did.

[unblock]

1. the strategy works because they have the media machinery to take him seriously

once upon a time, back when there were only 3 major networks plus pbs, someone carrying on like trump wouldn't get on air. not enough time, not enough bandwidth, not enough seriousness.

nowadays, between the sheer number of media outlets and the effective control the right-wing has over much of it, someone carrying on like trump gets taken seriously even though he has no real chance to win, and, of course, someone carrying on like him on the left would never get air time either, well, except to point out how horrible the left is.

but yes, the right-wing has long benefited from putting up horrible people on the far right, portraying them as "controversial" at worst, then making the rest of the right-wing look "normal" and "reasonable" by comparison, even though their policies are scarcely different and the fact that they rarely, if ever, repudiate what their more rhetorically extreme surrogates say.

[brooklynite]

2. No...

...if that was the plan, the response of the "smart" candidates like Bush and Walker to Trump's comments wouldn't have come two weeks later.

Add to which, the base voters don't WANT a "smarter" candidate, and aren't going to happily switch to Bush or Walker when Trump finally crashes.

[daleanime]

3. I don't doubt that there are some trying to make use of him....

but I'm fairly sure that that thought hasn't in his head.

Don't want to think about what maybe there.

[bvf]

4. Absolutely.

Some responses here seem to infer that you're claiming that incidents like the most recent are somehow coordinated, which is completely unnecessary.

Trump may as well pick his nose on camera and say he can do it because he's rich--the effect would be the same.

As far as his current polling goes: Remember when Herman Cain was leading the pack? Remember the favorite du jour?

[GreatGazoo]

5. "acting" ?

What I see is Trump's ego raging like a bonfire. Acting would imply that Trump can turn this stuff on and off but there is no off switch for Trump's ego.

Here is Trump acting:

No filters, no feedback, only a distorted sense of self-awareness that self-approves every bad idea in his own head.

The clown car strategy, if it is a strategy, is to keep lots of fringe candidates in the race and then try to roll their individual audiences into the base of the final candidate as they bow out.