He was a credible threat to the Democrats in that election up until he was forced to choose Sarah Palin as his running mate. Sarah Palin's involvement, if you remember--it feels like it's been forever; 7 years feels like an eternity in politics--was a vacuous country bumpkin who quit her Alaskan governorship, and was, some suspected, a way to appease the recently radicalized Tea Party fringe that did not actually come to power until the 2010 legislature elections. The Tea Party was a direct reaction by dispossessed, lower-class, undereducated, white people who did not like having an African-American for President.
Keep in mind that, at first, GOP bosses deliberately pandered to the Tea Party in a total war against Barack Obama, but it wasn't long before this strategy became a disaster of their own making. In October 2013, Ted Cruz--arguably the only thing worse than Trump, according to GOP strategists--single-handedly shut down the government over the debt ceiling, causing Congressional and party approval ratings to plummet. In addition to that, the GOP has voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act 56 times (as of February 2015), and the Benghazi Committee has devolved into a criminal circus (the article linked is definitely worth your time).
The corrosion of our political landscape is a much more insidious problem. It is primarily because of this that a pathological bullshitter who is utterly incapable of saying anything remotely true can have a shot at running for President. From the very beginning, GOP officials have used racial epithets against the President, and Joe Wilson's "YOU LIE!" only became a harbinger of the kind of interparty vitriol that has desecrated our political system enough for Trump to take over. Sarah Palin claimed that there would be "death panels" as a part of Obamacare, and today, GOP 2016 candidate Carly Fiorina is clinging on to a series of extremely doctored videos supposedly depicting the sale of aborted fetuses by Planned Parenthood, which very likely provided the motivation for a recent terrorist attack at a Planned Parenthood facility in Colorado, a claim that--of course--she denies.
There is a now-circulating conspiracy theory that posits that the Toxic Avenger is a Clinton plant. Specifically, it claims that Bill Clinton asked Donald Trump to run as a Republican in order to give Hillary an easy victory. It is something that Jeb! is trying to use to resuscitate his comatose campaign, after his appearance on The 700 Club had no effect, but it is doubtful that this tactic will do anything more than draw Trump's ire. While this idea is certainly seductive and hopeful in that can Trump really be this awful as a human being? Surely he isn't, really!, I doubt that it's actually true, because the world has never seen Trump be anything other than a cartoon character.
Donald Trump has teased a presidential campaign five times, first in 1988, and then in every presidential election since 2000, until he announced that he would actually run in 2016. It isn't something the Clintons would have had to ask him to do. Donald Trump is an accurate and terrifying measurement of the extent to which our political system has been corroded. We should have listened when he said that he was going to run, and taken his announcements as a warning that we have serious problems. The GOP had laid the foundation for his campaign; they left their house a mess, and like any other pest infestation, he moved right in. And he's here to stay, even as they conspire in secret to be rid of him. Whether or not they even can is yet to be seen.
