Last night I watched and listened for the Trump train to pass the crossing and it did. It had many car of freight to pull, but is did not come apart and kept up its speed right up to the end. Judging from the variety of dress in the audience, the Trump train pulled a many varied load.

This was also evident from the Trump’s speech in which he addressed many different voter constituencies, such as the unemployed, the fearful, the people working in the trades, the LGBTX group, the Israel voters, the patriots and Sander’s democrats, while his daughter Ivanky took in the stay at home mothers.

It is clear to me that Trump is really a third party candidate who has hijacked the USA Republican party. This he was able to do because of his own money and now the Republican establishment is looking in from the outside in this USA presidential race.

We have seen third party candidates in the US before, such as Ross Perrot, Ralph Nader and others. Ross had the money, but not the appeal. Yet, as a phenomenon he was a marker that all was not well with the democratic process. Obama hijacked the Democratic 2008 nomination process through social media and crowd funding. He was not the establishment candidate, but bypassed her anyway.

This makes for a new kind of politics altogether taking the reins out of the hands of the establishment financiers and passing them to a well heeled populist or one who can be crowd funded.

Now the Republicans have Trump who heads a ‘movement’ as Donald himself said, appealing in his speech across the traditional party boundaries for people’s votes. This makes for a new kind of politics altogether taking the reins out of the hands of the establishment financiers and passing them to a well heeled populist or one who can be crowd funded.

The election of Justin Trudeau last year was already viewed as a ‘movement’ by some CBC National’s commentators. This was a new kind of observation in my book and I kept it handy. Now we have Trump himself giving recognition to the fact that movement and let me add issue type politics has arrived, as he played up to its potential in last night‘s address.

I think we are participants in a make over of the political process that abandons the party based politics and embraces the social media vehicle to define issues, select the candidate and raise the money. However, there is also the election of the local riding candidates to consider and that process too could be affected in a similar way.

When was it that people said they were not interested in politics? What goes around, comes around. No? However, it could be that this noted disinterest was an early warning sign that the process at hand had lost its power, appeal and significance.
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