The four gifts of Donald Trump

If you’re a political junkie who checks the RealClearPolitics GOP nomination graph regularly, you’re familiar with that long blue line that stretches high above the 14 — now 13 — other lines. It’s the Trump line, and it’s been so vertical for the last two months that he’s nearly perpendicular to the other candidates.

{mosads}Trump’s reign at the top of the polls has been Wile E. Coyote-esque. The coyote chases the roadrunner over a cliff, but he keeps running on the air. He never falls until he looks look down and realizes that there’s no ground beneath him. Then he waves bye-bye and plummets.

It’ll be Trump waving bye-bye if he doesn’t find something substantive to stand on, soon.

This week, that blue line finally began its inevitable descent, with Trump falling from 32 percent in the pre-debate CNN poll to 24 percent in the post-debate CNN poll.

Many conservatives will be pleased to see Trump fall while others will erupt into angry tirades. Trump temper-tantrums (from @realdonaldtrump and his faithful followers) will dominate social media like never before.

If that happens, Republicans should remember to thank him on his way down because nobody can take away the four great things Trump did for the Republican Party in this primary.

1. Trump destroyed Jeb Bush. Okay, so former Florida Gov. Bush probably doesn’t think that’s great, but it is. Bush represents everything that is wrong with establishment politics. Before Trump came along, Bush was in first place by a wide margin, and that margin wasn’t a result of merit. It was manufactured by a political machine: a golden name, an infrastructure of big donors and an heir of dynastic inevitability.

Then came Trump, who focused the brunt of his constant attacks on Bush, who now sits at fifth place (behind all three non-politcians) in the new CNN poll.

If Trump ends up responsible for overthrowing an unofficial American monarchy, there are no words for how grateful Americans should be.

2. Our system of government was designed for an informed electorate. When the electorate is not informed, we all suffer for it. Armed with his celebrity and a completely fearless attitude toward conflict, Trump singlehandedly raised the audience for the primary debates by about 300 percent. That means about 18 million people who don’t follow the news closely heard about the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), the Iran deal, the Planned Parenthood videos and much more, merely as a side effect of wondering what insanity would spew from Trump’s mouth.

A great candidate like Carly Fiorina was noticed by the masses much sooner than she would have been without Trump wrangling millions of viewers. So, in a strange way, Ben Carson and Fiorina owe some of the success they’re having to Trump, simply because he’s the one who brought in 36 million eyes and ears to discover that they existed.

3. His divisiveness is (somewhat) uniting a party with multiple schisms. Everyone in the Democratic Party seems to be on the same page politically. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida is a great DNC leader (“we want debates” riot notwithstanding). Somehow she’s created party discipline that transcends politicians and has trickled down to the private citizens who consider themselves Democrats. She’s like a party whip that stepped out of Congress and went to work on the people.

That’s why they have a five candidate primary with three perpetually polling near 1 percent while the Republicans have representatives from every schism of the party with Bush and Sen. Ted Cruz (Texas) as ideological bookends. That’s why, according to a recent Monmouth poll, 66 percent of Republican voters want a Washington outsider to win the nomination.

Trump’s divisiveness had somewhat changed the party from a group composed of infighting Tea Party Republicans, evangelicals, libertarian-Republicans, moderate Republicans, establishment Republicans, foreign policy hawks and whatever else to the the Trumpers and the anti-Trumpers.

4. He gave political correctness a nasty kick in the teeth. And while his rhetoric has been too juvenile (“look at that face”) and too fantastical (“I will make Mexico pay for that wall”) for him to be taken seriously by many Americans, he showed that if Republicans have the courage of their convictions, they don’t have to run to a camera to apologize every time some faux-outrage-driven Twitter clique demands it.

Yeah, I know, he’s still in first place, but Trump is like the TV show “Lost”: all setup, no payoff. A promiser of all things impossible. A dog barking so loud that you hardly notice he doesn’t have any teeth. Maybe it’ll be months before he discovers the empty air beneath his feet, but it’s coming.

I’ve criticized him as much as anyone on inconsistency and his remarks about Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), as well as on his general unelectability. Many Republicans aren’t sad to see him fall in the polls. Many will not be sad if he falls more. But I hope they will notice that he left some good things in his path of destruction.

Zipperer is assistant professor of political science at Georgia Military College.