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The GOP is soon to be dead if they can't find a way to get a little more modern on social issues. As much as social conservatism appeals to a good portion of their base, that base is aging and declining in numbers while the US population grows in diversity every year. We can argue about it all we want, but those are the statistical facts. Jeb Bush has figured it out - perhaps inadvertently, which is a large part of why he's been successful in Florida. Unfortunately he's not as good as Trump in terms of taking advantage of the media circus.

The fact that someone like Trump is running what appears to be a successful platform should be a wake up call. He'd be a disastrous president - not because he speaks his mind plainly and is unencumbered from the traditional financial bribery (which I applaud), but because a president that is that confrontational isn't going to be good on the world stage with other nuclear based powers. His conservative pandering is interesting - but it lacks any real-word view of how he'd accomplish the ideas that he throws out there (let's build a wall and deport everyone)... He has a serious "filter" issue - and that's appreciated in front of the media, but I don't want him in a world-power meeting representing the united states.

I think he knows which social buttons to push and how to stir up a crowd. I think he knows very little about how to fund or how to accomplish what he's talking about. Likely he'd gridlock with congress (worse than it is already) and the associated lawsuits would last for decades.

A viable 3rd party would make things interesting. Too bad it doesn't exist yet.

On top of this, congress is a train wreck and can't get anything passed without internal pandering to business interests behind closed doors. One way to fix that might be to make the private negotiations public and send the cockroaches running from the light....

Another thing we need to fix is no more spending without a pay-it-down business plan in place on every bill. Spending our way out of a deficit might have some merit in terms of economic stimulation, but it's not a very good way to manage a government.