A couple of weeks ago Charles Gasparino wrote in The Daily Beast about the Trump candidacy. He argued that Trump was mostly running to "build his brand." Gasparino may have been correct when he wrote that, who knows?
Subsequent events appear to have proved him wrong. Trump's intemperate comments about the violent criminality of a significant percentage of illegal immigrants have seriously damaged his brand, with "boycott Trump" spreading far beyond the Hispanic community.
It would be massively ironic if a candidacy that began as a brand-building exercise inadvertently became a do-or-die effort to salvage a tattered reputation via electoral vindication. Stranger things have happened
