There is a longstanding cartoon routine of someone running off a cliff. The figure may be human or an animal and it is almost always male. The figure runs straight off a cliff and then appears to be running on air. The laws of gravity are suspended and the figure remains aloft, legs churning. Finally comes the moment of truth. He realizes his predicament and looks down. There below him, far, far below him, is the hard ground. Suddenly reality takes over. The result is SPLAT! Actually, since the fall does not kill him, it’s not too real.

So far that moment of truth has not yet arrived for the current cartoon character running on air. He has managed to maintain his illusions for far longer than I would have anticipated. There has been no Cuban Missile Crisis. No 9/11. And his hurricane failure occurred in Puerto Rico and not Louisiana. Thanks to John McCain and a few others he was not able to strip Trumpicans of their healthcare otherwise the Trump really would have hit the fan.  Is it really possible to sustain his delusions for an entire four-year term?

Take Kellyanne Conway. She is an easy figure to ridicule. Even her husband constantly belittles her judgment (which makes you wonder since they still apparently are together if she does not secretly share his views and feeds him information). At the public level, she imprinted the new president right from the start of his administration as someone living in an alternate reality. At the time, the fuss over the crowd size might have seem a minor diversion. Who knew such distortion was standard operating procedure later exemplified by the Huckabee Huckster?

Then Conway had a little moment of truth. She was charged with violation of the Hatch Act, in fact, repeated violations of the Hatch Act. The Office of Special Council recommended termination. She responded with the same cavalier dismissal of the rule of law as the Secretary of the Treasury and the Attorney General had before her.

Blah, blah blah. If you’re trying to silence me through the Hatch Act, it’s not going to work. Let me know when the jail sentence starts.

Answer: it starts when there is a Democratic president and the rule of law returns to the White House.

But once upon a time, Conway did live in real world. She made her living as a political operative. You cannot succeed as a political consultant if you require your client to live in an alternate reality. Sooner or later there is an election. If your political advice is based solely on wishful thinking or a desire to please the client, you will not last long as a bogus prognosticator with little understanding of the real world.

We just witnessed an example of an alternate reality trumping the real world. The activity was poll results produced by real pollsters who operate in the real world. That does not mean their polls were correct. It does mean that based on the professional standards of the field the polls taken were reflective of the real political world at the time they were taken. They did not bode well for the client. You would have to be dumb beyond belief not to know that response would be “You’re fired.”

The results are worth noting. The polls show a slew of Democratic candidates who would win a national election based on the popular vote. The polls range from a high of 57% for Joe Biden to in the 40s% for a variety of figures. One key to interpreting the meaning the polls is the relative constancy of the vote for the incumbent. He consistently polled at 41-42% of the vote.  These numbers put him 5-6% below the 2016 vote and suggest that no matter who the Democratic candidate is, that is the best he will do. The range for the Democratic candidates probably reflects how well known these candidates are. My prediction would be that as they become better known, the undecided in the polls will swing Democratic and the 50s to 41/42% will become the norm…unless more revelations from the investigations drive them even lower or events in the real world expose him as a con artist even to Trumpicans.

Naturally, these poll results were unacceptable. Therefore they are wrong. Therefore they are fake polls. He is not losing bigtime in Wisconsin, Michigan, Virginia, Maine, Minnesota and Pennsylvania. He Is not losing by significant amounts in Florida, Georgia, Iowa, and North Carolina. He is not just losing slightly in Ohio. He is not just barely holding on in Texas. Instead he is winning everywhere. Bigtime.

There is another red wave coming to match the predicted one in 2016.

Well, the polls I see we’re doing great in Pennsylvania. We’re doing really good in North Carolina. Florida, I’m winning by a lot. Ohio, I’m winning by a lot. I just left Iowa. We’re winning that by a lot. And every poll that we have, I’m winning by ⸺ we’re doing well.

You can bank on it! There is no need for the world’s worst manager who lost more money than any American in American history to spend any money in the states where he is winning by so much. In the no-adult-supervision White House, he is free to deploy the campaign resources where they are most needed like in Oregon, New Mexico, and Minnesota. Why squander his money on states that he already has locked up? Better to expand the base and flip even more states than he did in 2016.

Keep in mind that the national polls in 2016 did a good job; it was at the state level where the discrepancies occurred. If the real polls remain consistent throughout the campaign, there will come a time when Trumpicans in the Senate and House will have a moment of truth. They already saw the red wave in 2016 wipe out dozens of colleagues at the federal level. They saw Democratic advances at the state level. They may realize that gerrymandering is being contained and the post-2020 census prospects are dismal.  It is possible that at some point the survival mechanism will kick in and these politicians who know real polls from fake polls will want to avoid another red wave like 2016. There is no way to know when or even if such a moment of truth will occur but it could happen next year when the truth of the 2020 elections becomes clearer.

The rest of the world is already ahead of the Trumpicans. They learned that THE DONALD is merely a character in the professional wrestling arena and not a real person. They know when Bonespur Boy is forced to go into the arena in the real world that he will back down.

“If we were to believe everything Trump has said for the past three years, there would have been war with China, North Korea and Mexico,” said Joseph Fahim, an Egyptian film critic. “The guy’s a joke, he’s not serious. We don’t know if these threats are something to believe in, or just another of his many stunts.”

Unfortunately, the immature child commands a great deal of institutional power as President of the United States. Who knows what he might do if forced to confront the real world. Deport millions to prove to Trumpicans that he is fighting for them? Imagine if he actually had the organizational and managerial skills to do it.

There are a few simple tests to monitor his grasp of the real world, his willingness to operate it, and his success if he tries. We don’t need to wait to see how he deploys his campaign resources to know if he is operating based on real polls or his fake polls. We’ll know in a month because of health care.

“You’ll see that in a month when we introduce it. We’re going to have a plan. That’s subject to winning the House, Senate, and presidency, which hopefully we’ll win all three. We’ll have phenomenal health care.” 

 So claims the very stable genius who is the smartest person in the room and the only one who can solve America’s problems. Remember how he produced the evidence from Hawaii on Obama SOON SOON. Remember how he sued all the women who have accused him of harassment as soon as the election was over. Now we have the target as surely as they did for William Miller on October 22, 1844 with the Great Disappointment. We know the date. July 16. We know the action. Bull-Trump Care. We know the red wave is coming. Don’t believe the fake polls, He doesn’t. SPLAT.