The three stages of denying Donald Trump

Hold off on deciding which bill the Treasury should stamp President Donald Trump’s face on, because I’m about to drop a bad news bomb. There’s no 50-foot border wall in America’s future. No trade wars. No President Camacho-style, TV-MA State of the Union addresses. No gold-plating of the White House walls. No President Trump.

There are currently three stages of security blocking Trump’s path to the nation’s highest office.

Stage One: The convention

Primary elections are only as democratic as the party elders want them to be. Witness Hillary Clinton’s army of super delegates, able to leap tall electorates in a single bound.

The establishment is not going to let Trump take the nomination without an all-out war. We’ve already seen Mitt Romney fire off a scheme where voters in certain areas vote how he tells them to. We’ve seen House and Senate leaders slap Trump’s hand from afar, and we’ve seen Sen. Marco Rubio jump into the mud with him. We’ve even seen a Draft Paul Ryan movement. There’s more to come, and judging by Trump underperforming his poll numbers in some states, it’s working.

If Trump falls one delegate short of the magic number of 1,237 on the first ballot, that will be a bug-meets-windshield moment for his presidential aspirations.

The Republican Party is like the Titanic right now. This GOP primary started off as a great big exciting adventure, but now it has violently collided with Donald J. Iceberg, and the party isn’t about to go down with the ship.

Stage Two: The general election (A Tale of Two Donalds)

First comes the tale of Donald the victim: One of the reasons Trump has sailed through the GOP primary is that he wants to kick special interests in the teeth and exile the lobbyists from the legislative process. And a beautiful Exodus it would be. Representatives, their puffy eyes glistened with tears, forced to pass legislation that serves the interests of the American people instead of corporations and special interest groups. C-SPAN would dub it “the goodbye episode” and receive its highest ratings ever.

The only problem is, while every grassroots American — from the staunchest Bernie Sanders socialist in his Che Guevara T-shirt to the fella in Texas who thinks Ted Cruz is a little too liberal — despises special interests and lobbyists, both the parties and nearly all the politicians love them. Even if they claim to hate them. It’s a complicated game of don’t bite the hand that feeds you, unless you get caught with crumbs on your shirt. And even then, don’t leave any teeth marks.

It would be hard enough to win a general election with one side against him. With both sides against him, it would be impossible, even if he was squeaky clean and as presidential as his excellency George Washington.

Now for the tale of Donald the perpetrator: He isn’t squeaky clean or presidential. Not even close. He couldn’t spot squeaky clean and presidential with the Hubble Telescope. If squeaky clean and presidential were contagious, he might have caught it from John Kasich when they shook hands after a debate. Unfortunately, these qualities are noncommunicable, and even if they weren’t, Trump seems to have a natural immunity.

The Trump plurality of the Republican party, who would excuse their leader of seemingly any transgression, won’t help him in the general election. And by the time November rolls around, they’ll be the only ones voting for him. Understand: Trump just spent the last seven months creating the campaign against himself. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz and the rest of the crew at the Democratic National Committee are going to feel obliged to send him a thank you card if he is the nominee, because he has done all their work for them. The only difficult part will be choosing from all the gift-wrapped gaffes Trump left under the tree.

Stage Three: Donald J. Trump

Trump is self-defeating. Unlike much of the rest of the media, I don’t think Trump is worse than the next politician; he’s just worse at pretending not to be worse. There was a time when he could have gotten out of his own way, but now that time can only be accessed with a flex capacitor and 1.21 gigawatts of electricity. Trump should have collected his base supporters with his antics and then pivoted away from the nonsense and become presidential.

I’ve seen him try it. It’s the Trump you see on victory nights congratulating Cruz and Rubio on their hard work and minor victories, but that Trump doesn’t show up anywhere else. And it’s not an issue of strategy, it’s an issue of temperament. He hasn’t pivoted to a position that’s above the attacks and pettiness, because he’s incapable of being above the attacks and pettiness.

One day, some candidate will make it to the emerald city to take on the flying-monkey army of lobbyists, but it won’t be Trump. The establishment — the other candidates, the media, both major parties and the special interests — wants to take him down, and he has supplied them with all the ammunition they’ll ever need.

Eddie Zipperer is an assistant professor of political science at Georgia Military College and a regular contributor to The Hill.