Trump as a Thief?

His ignorance about world affairs and the insults that he constantly dishes out to everyone did not prevent the neocon Donald Trump from matching Hillary Clinton in the polls today ahead of the general elections in November, according to analysis from the site RealClearPolitics. It’s hardly been more than two months since the Democratic candidate was leading by an 11 percent margin.

Trump’s success can be explained by looking at his way of channeling popular anger against the “system” and presenting himself as the spokesperson for the worst bigots; and by the serious lack of integrity that Clinton suffers from while being attacked on the right by Republicans and on the left by the Sanders camp; but also, in general, by the shrinking of the American democratic space.

The fact that Trump’s popularity can be explained doesn’t mean that such popularity is not beyond comprehension.

Almost designated as the Republican nominee, Trump, to this day, has not stopped saying off-color things — which have given him a boost. Against good environmental sense, he has just announced that he’d bring back the Keystone XL pipeline project and would repeal the Paris Agreement signed last year to slow down global warming. Admittedly, this does not contradict the position of the Republican establishment. In foreign affairs, he recently threatened South Korea that he’d withdraw U.S. troops from the North Korean border if Seoul did not increase its financial contribution — a project applauded on Wednesday by the abominable Pyongyang regime.

Could his rise finally be stopped by collective action in San Diego by former students of his now-defunct Trump University? This event has been a problem for him since 2010 but has been gaining traction recently. The lawsuit alleges that Mr. Trump and the for-profit university that he founded in 2005 and of which he owned 93 percent, swindled people out of tens of thousands of dollars by convincing them under pressure to take courses that were going to turn them into real estate experts. True to his form, during a partisan meeting last Friday, the Republican candidate hammered that the justice system was “rigged” and that the judge was “probably Mexican” and that he was “a hater of Donald Trump.”

Mr. Trump will continue to say whatever comes to his mind. Meanwhile, here’s a story that sullies his image as a real estate tycoon, the platform of his go-getter reputation, and as a defender of the outraged American. We had not yet seen him as a thief.