No matter how robust his polling numbers with hard core tea party Republicans who love his crass, idiotic bellicosity, Trump becomes less of a threat to the Republican establishment and less likely to get the nomination with each Archie Bunker moment.
Each day brings a new low of behavior from this ugly, ugly person, mocking a reporter’s disability, like Rush Limbaugh mocked Michael J. Fox’s condition several years back. Trump casually, thoughtlessly, mocked the reporter’s physicality, like some retrograde comic doing a “retard” routine 20 plus years ago. Sure, his people don’t care. Sure, like all of the other societal politenesses that he labels “PC” and his followers call censorship, they’ll embrace this as another thing that you could do when America was great. Like calling someone a “retard!” When did that word become like nigger? Why are liberals taking my favorite words away? Consarnit!
The TV talking heads can say this won’t hurt him either, like the other daily lies, fascist pronouncements and asshole attacks on people doing their jobs, but it does. It does lower his ceiling of potential support. It does make him less and less credible as someone who could go to the convention and broker a nomination, no less win one outright.
His antics make him untouchable to anyone outside of his core. He doesn’t have to implode and crater, as many expected him to do by now. He just has to continue to be Trump, ie. a nasty, lowlife cretinous creep with no intellectual integrity and a tendency towards casual hatred, to blunt any possibility of him being taken seriously enough as a legitimate contender.
Shame really. If he could have just dialed it down to an 8, he could have been something and really crippled the GOP. But he’s keeping it up at a cartoonish 11 and giving hate challenged lightweights like Cruz and Rubio hope.
Next Nov. will be another 53-47 affair, with delusional GOPers repeating their questioning of the polls and another post-mortum report that will reiterate that they should have nominated someone MORE conservative, but they should, overall, be more inclusive, blah, blah, blah.
The GOP is the Seinfeld party – they don’t learn, nobody grows and they’re about nothing.
The Polislice 
All true. Your last sentence is perfect. As to the overall point, I agree. But I don’t see Ds making progress in Congress. Maybe can do better in Senate. Don’t see them recruiting talented folks at local , state and HOR level. So same gridlock is likely to continue. In hindsight, Obama was right to use all political capital he could during the window when Ds had congress . Rs have won at state level and gerrymandering is worse than ever
Yes, gerrymandering is the other head of the two headed democracy decimating ogre. So under present circumstances Dems have little chance of changing the direction of the ship until after the 2020 census and a re-gerrymander. Although, many states are taking action to end politically based gerrymandering and to put it in the hands of neutral computer based models or committees. This is the easier head to kill because the problem of uncontested districts and the convoluted district maps to create them is fairly obvious to most everybody. It also won’t take an amendment to the constitution or personnel change on the Supreme Court to fix. I’m optimistic about this.
And no doubt Dems have to just do better to field candidates and make the case in some places they’ve seemingly abandoned.