I just got back

"The medium is the message."
~ Marshall McLuhan

"I just got back from Canada, where I had a run-in with McLuhan.  I won."
~ W.H. Auden

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---------------- [NYMagazine article from Sept. 2015, continued] ------------------ ...When Trump attacked [Megyn] Kelly the next day in language that seemed to refer to menstruation, most of his GOP rivals made a show of rallying around Kelly.

     But the party's real stand on the sanctity of female biology had been encapsulated in the debate by Walker's and Marco Rubio's endorsement of a ban on abortions for women who have been raped or risk dying in childbirth.  No wonder Trump's bloodying of Kelly gave him another uptick in polls of Republican voters.

     Republican potentates can't fight back against him because the party's base has his back.  He's ensnared the GOP Establishment in a classic Catch-22:  It wants Trump voters -- it can't win elections without them -- but doesn't want Trump calling attention to what those voters actually believe.  

Poor Bush, once the Establishment's great legacy hope, is so ill-equipped to pander to the base that he outdid Trump in defending the nativist term anchor babies by applying it to Asians as well as Mexicans.  

(Bush also started mimicking Trump's vilification of hedge-fund managers.)  

The candidates who have gone after Trump with the greatest 
gusto -- Graham, Paul, Carly Fiorina, Jindal, George Pataki -- have been so low in the polls they had nothing to lose.  (Even so, all except Fiorina have fallen farther after doing so -- or, in Rick Perry's case, fallen out of the race altogether.)  

The others were painfully slow to challenge him.  That cowardice was foretold in June when most of the presidential field waited days to take a stand against the Confederate flag following the Charleston massacre.  If they're afraid to come out against slavery a century after Appomattox, 

it only follows that they'd cower before a billionaire who insults his male adversaries' manhood as reflexively as he attacks women's looks.  As Steve Schmidt, the 2008 McCain campaign manager, has said, Trump had all but emasculated Bush by the time Bush belatedly started fighting back.  In the second debate, Fiorina finished the job by counterpunching Trump with more vigor than Bush could muster.

     All of this should make Democrats feel pretty confident about 2016.  A couple of conspiracy theorists on the right have speculated that Trump is a Hillary Clinton plant.  

But Trump has hurt Clinton too.  

Her penchant for dodging controversial questions -- fracking, the Keystone pipeline, the Trans-Pacific trade pact -- looks still worse when contrasted with Trump's shoot-from-the-hip decisiveness.  Even when asked to name her favorite ice-cream flavor during a July appearance at a New Hampshire Dairy Twirl, she could do no better than "I like nearly everything."

     It's not a coincidence that the Joe Biden buzz heated up just as Trump started taking off.  The difference between Clinton's and Biden's views is negligible, but some Democrats may be in the market for a candidate of their own who will wander off the reservation and say anything in the echt Trump manner.  

Yesterday's "gaffes" are today's authenticity.  

Whatever happens with Biden, the Clinton campaign seems oblivious to the possibility that Trump is a double-edged sword, exposing her weaknesses even as he undermines the GOP.  When he boasted in the Fox News debate that the Clintons had no choice but to attend his last wedding

 because he had given them money, he reduced the cloudy questions about transactions between the Clinton Foundation and its donors to a primal quid pro quo that any voter can understand.

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{"Donald Trump Is Saving Our Democracy" -- article written by Frank Rich, published in New York Magazine September 20, 2015}

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