Donald Trump

The repellent reality television personality has recorded robo-calls for Romney, because nothing makes a person more excited to vote than the sound of Donald Trump invading your personal space and hectoring you for no reason. Citizens across Michigan can look forward to unsolicited phone calls from a recording of the guy who tells D-list celebrities that they’re fired, only instead he will be telling them that the former governor of Massachusetts is “a good man” and former Sen. Rick Santorum is a “career politician.”

Any decent human being with a modicum of shame would be embarrassed to be seen publicly with Mr. Trump, which is partly why Romney refused to be photographed with the grotesque parody of American wealth-worship when meeting with him late last year, but Romney is in desperation mode as he seeks to win the support of a bunch of people who just don’t like him very much. Now Trump is headlining Romney fundraisers and making radio appearances on behalf of the candidate and making sure that Americans know that they can expect Mr. Romney to be as fine a president as Trump University is a (non-accredited for-profit online) college.

Romney, truly the “Trump Steaks” of Republican presidential candidates, is statistically tied with Rick Santorum in the most recent Michigan poll, and running even with Santorum nationally as well, but this Trump endorsement should be a huge help in his efforts to win over the all-important “credulous racist birther moron” vote.

Trump made sure his big endorsement coincided with the premiere of the new season of “Celebrity Apprentice,” and he is also counting on the fact that everyone basically forgot exactly how toxic his own pretend run for the nomination eventually became last year. And basically only liberal blogs are even bringing up the fact that Trump’s “platform” as a candidate was dark insinuations about the president’s birthplace and personal history, and that it collapsed entirely after the president actually released his “long-form birth certificate,” which showed that his already released regular birth certificate was genuine and accurate. (Though a couple conservatives have criticized Romney’s open embrace of Trump, more because Trump is extremely unpopular than because he’s a racist fraud.)

Romney indulging Trump by accepting his endorsement was gross, and Romney recruiting Trump to actively campaign for him should be universally declared well outside the realm of “acceptable” national campaign behavior, but it’s maybe too obviously sad and desperate for people to get up in arms about. (And the political press is uncomfortable explicitly calling a ridiculous con artist a ridiculous con artist, even when it’s post-birtherism Donald Trump, so the lack of “nationally reviled untrustworthy clown endorses candidate” headlines at the traditional news organizations is not terribly surprising.) But it’s also gross that NBC renewed Trump’s contract and launched a new season of his terrible show, and it did it for similar reasons as Romney: He gets ratings, and headlines.

It just shouldn’t be forgotten or ignored that the only substantial difference between campaigning with Donald Trump and campaigning with Orly Taitz is that Trump is considered kosher because he’s a major-network TV star. (Well, and Orly has much better hair.)

Rove, see, is operating from the outmoded idea that the Republican party should attempt to appeal to anyone not currently already old, angry, and skeptical of the president’s citizenship. From Karl Rove’s perspective, a man universally regarded as an unserious ass should not be hosting a major party’s presidential candidates and then selecting one of them, reality show-style, as his endorsee, live on television. For Rove, the fact that polls show associating with Trump is a net negative even among GOP voters is worrying, and not, as it is for the rest of us, hilarious.

On Fox yesterday, Rove encouraged the RNC to step in and fix this, which is unlikely to happen, because what power does the RNC have over any of these clowns?

“More importantly, what the heck are the Republican candidates doing showing up at a debate [whose moderator] says, ‘I may run for president next year as an Independent’? I think the Republican National [Committee] chairman [Reince Priebus] should step in and say, ‘We strongly discourage every candidate from appearing in a debate moderated by somebody who’s gonna run for president,’ ” he said.

Hah, so Trump is unacceptable because… he might pretend to run for president again, and not because he’s an idiotic unrepentant birther who constantly uses barely veiled racist tropes to criticize the president. Just checking!

Though the day Karl Rove objects to a Republican candidate for attempting to drum up support with bigoted dog-whistles is the day Rove accuses someone else of being incapable of feeling shame.

The point is that while everyone else is out, in glorious free market fashion, solely to make a buck (Trump has a book out! Newt has eight books out!), Rove is interested in the state of the party, and he would like to perhaps help the party to win some elections next year. The problem for him, right now, is that the actual people in his party seem to strongly prefer charlatans to proper candidates. Poor Karl Rove! The permanent Republican majority is basically becoming an angry elderly minority, convinced that it represents 100 percent of the only America that should count. (Which is not to say that this angry minority doesn’t have a good shot at taking both houses of Congress and the White House next year, so Rove should relax and continue raising hundreds of millions of dollars in anonymous money.)

Trump still has a regular Monday morning “Fox & Friends” call-in deal? I guess Fox can overlook a regular guest being a loyal employee of a rival media conglomerate — Trump abandoned his publicity stunt presidential campaign when NBC threatened to find a new “Apprentice” host, remember — as long as they’re willing to spout birtherist bullshit on live television.

So Trump, who badly damaged his “lovable mogul” brand with his divisive and humiliating fake campaign, will now (or in a month or so) parasitically attach himself to a presidential candidate, in order to flatter Trump’s sense of himself as an important kingmaker, a delusion that has been enabled by Romney and Perry and Bachmann and Cain actually meeting with him. I’m guessing Trump will endorse whomever is polling best next month.

Will the press (the non-Fox press) mention Trump’s noxious, racist birtherism, should the recipient of the Trump endorsement gratefully accept the Trump nod with a joint appearance? I am not holding my breath.