Donald Trump: indulging in James Bond fantasies

Donald Trump remains the clear frontrunner to be Republican presidential nominee despite his "stupid", "crazy" and "plainly false" remarks, says Matthew Norman in The Independent.

His "predictably nuanced response" to events in Paris and elsewhere has included advocating a database to track Muslim Americans, calling for the revival of waterboarding for terrorist suspects and sharing his memory of watching TV footage of "thousands and thousands" of Arab-Americans in New Jersey cheering 9/11. The first two can be viewed as "neo-fascistic dog whistles" calculated to boost his appeal, but the third is an easily verifiable lie which raises the "intriguing question" of why he is being rewarded for it rather than punished.

What "shields" Trump from global condemnation is firstly the fact that he is so clearly a "buffoon" and secondly that, at least to European ears, "quite a lot of relatively mainstream Republican concerns abortion, gun control" also sound "Trumpishly nuts", says Hugo Rifkind in The Times. But Trump isn't just a clown. He represents "nothing less than the unabashed rise of the American far-right"; something "truly, alarmingly horrible... And right now he's the leading light of the GOP."

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Fellow Republicans must reject this "creeping fascism", agrees The Seattle Times. "Race-baiting and xenophobia, ignited by fabrication, reflect the worst in human nature." For now, the other candidates are simply following his lead, says Trevor Timm in The Guardian, capitalising on Americans' fear of terrorists even although all this "chest-thumping" is exactly what IS wants, adds Amanda Marcotte on Salon.com.

The Paris attacks were always going to incline "your average conservative" to xenophobia, and Trump is "by far the best cipher for that urge... He is the living embodiment of how a lot of Americans feel right now: angry, racist, eager for some James Bond fantasy about shooting your way out of the problem."

The good news is that since "we're dealing with moods rather than constituencies, it's also possible that some other issue will pop up between now and the primaries that will distract Republican voters, and the polls will shift again".