If the Democrats had been allowed to design their dream contender for the Republican nomination for president, they would have come up with somebody very much like Donald Trump. Trump’s rampant embrace of the gospel of wealth, Gordon Gecko-style, would seem to be the perfect way to whisk away any voters concerned – even a little bit – about the scourge of inequality from any potential Republican sentiments they might be harbouring. Contra wise, if the Republicans were given the right to create a candidate to seek the Democratic Party’s nomination for their own benefit, they would have been well pleased with their handiwork – if the result came to resemble someone like Bernie Sanders. Now here is a figure dead certain to convince many that the Democrats stand for separating folks from their money – and giving the republic over to the godless socialists.

Right off the bat, let’s make it clear – neither of these two individuals will win their respective party nominations, despite their strong poll numbers right now, their high media visibility and their ability to bring in the big crowds. However, by their very presence, they can be counted upon to keep more substantive contenders busy swatting at the political mosquitoes and sucking up much of the available oxygen – and generally messing around with other candidates’ hopes – and keeping the media story line focused on these two outliers as a way to frighten all those horses rather thoroughly.

Let’s take a peek at Donald Trump first. The Donald, as he modestly likes to be called, grew up in a family in New York City where real estate was already the family business, but he did it much better, bigger and more brashly than his father had ever dreamed of doing. His father had been a man who largely redeveloped lower and middle income housing complexes, becoming well-to-do but not to robber baron-ish levels. Typical of many real estate developers, The Donald’s own career has followed a boom and bust cycle that resulted in a very public bankruptcy and then an equally vast rebuilding of his fortune as he built more casinos, hotels, and some very glitzy high-rise apartment buildings. Along the way, Trump managed to construct an outsized ego and public persona that helped him add something of a television empire to his portfolio, including a nationally broadcast beauty pageant and one of those popular reality shows, the American version of The Apprentice.

In sculpting his run for the Republican nomination, Trump has created (or focused tightly on) a campaign persona that presents The Donald as a no-nonsense, tough talking, straight talking, no-bullshit, tell-it-like-it-is business leader who knows how to do things and get things working right. (In past years, he was among the leaders of the ‘birthers’, those people who insisted, despite all evidence to the contrary, that Barack Obama was some kind of Kenyan Muslim Manchurian candidate on behalf of some sort of evil conspiracy that was hatched at Obama’s birth – although he has now effectively dropped that from his rhetorical quiver this time around.) Along the way, though, he has made a point of calling the current administration and its officials stupid and equipped with especially poor negotiating skills – or worse – particularly in relation to the just-concluded P5+1 Iran nuclear accord.

But Trump has turned his feelings about immigration reform (or the problem of illegal immigration, depending on where you stand on the issue) as the big kahuna of his campaign so far. He seems to have been betting his chips that this is where the red meat was to be found in voter support terms. Some of his wilder rhetorical excesses have sent him shooting off such riffs as the Mexicans are sending America their murderers, muggers and rapists across the border and that if he is president, no more mister nice guy on this one. He will build a humongous wall that will prevent any more illegal migration and – presto – problem solved. (Left unspoken so far is the awkward fact that a really humongous wall north of Beijing didn’t keep the Huns, Mongols and Manchus north of it, and that the US-Mexican border is already extensively fenced and fiercely patrolled, but, heck, never mind.)

This, of course, does speak to a national angst about illegal immigration/undocumented foreigners that every politician must somehow address in this electoral cycle. Nuance is rarely rewarded in this area, however, despite the difficulty of any simple solution to immigration (into the US, or into Europe, East Asia – or Southern Africa, for that matter). Especially among Republican activists most likely to participate in political activities or to vote in the primary elections that select the delegates to the convention to choose the nominee, politicians continue to assume the bloody-minded approach such as Trump’s is the answer that will gain the most traction with primary voters.

As it stands now, among major contestants for their party’s nomination, Florida Senator Marco Rubio has effectively been the only one who has – albeit rather tentatively – embraced policies that could, eventually, lead to a pathway to citizenship for all those undocumented aliens. Up until this past weekend, Trump’s harping on immigration and Mexican rapists, in tandem with his take on stupid Obama administration officials, had actually propelled him to the top of the heap in a number of early polls meant to gauge who was top of the heap in the Republican clown car. (With some 15 declared candidates now, the gaggle of contenders is unflatteringly said to resemble one of those circus acts where a whole raft of clowns surprisingly spill out of a tiny Volkswagen.) One poll, in fact, showed him at 17% support, versus 14% for his nearest rival, Jeb Bush.

But then, perhaps like Icarus, the legendary young man who flew so close to the Sun the wax and feather wings made by his father so he could escape island imprisonment melted and he plummeted to his death in the sea, Trump let his street-smart, smart aleck mouth get way out ahead of himself, almost as if he was signalling he was impervious to harm. In talking about the kind of strong leadership he would bring to the White House, he managed to criticise Arizona Senator John McCain – the 2008 Republican candidate for president – as a man who was no hero because he had been taken prisoner. As The Donald had said, “He’s not a war hero. He’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.” McCain had spent some six years imprisoned by North Vietnam after his jet fighter had been shot out of the sky. As a result of his dreadful treatment in the ‘Hanoi Hilton’, he cannot lift his arms above his shoulders.

Now while McCain may not have been successful as a presidential candidate, having been blown out of the water by Barack Obama in 2008, he has, since his return from Vietnam, become the poster child for heroism under extreme duress. Virtually every Republican candidate and party functionary – save for Texas Senator Ted Cruz who chose to defend Trump (with cynics arguing Trump’s demise as a candidate is now inevitable and Cruz was building a case to capture Trump’s supporters going forward) – practically ran to a podium or a electronic device to smack Trump around for this statement. For his own part, Trump told the media in Iowa following a candidates’ forum once his statement on McCain had earned him flack, “I always believe in apologising if you’ve done something wrong, but if you read my statement, you’ll see I said nothing wrong.” Okay, just extraordinarily tin-eared?

Watch: Donald Trump in Phoenix, Arizona

The question now is whether Trump has now reached his high water mark in support and that from now on the question will simply be how quickly he fades away and his supporters drift towards other would-be candidates. Compounding Trump’s problem, people have now noticed Trump, in contrast to McCain, did not serve in the military during the Vietnam War, and that in one of his statements trying to explain all that, he explained his military deferments related to a bone spur in one of his feet. Unfortunately, he couldn’t remember which foot it was that had that massive medical issue. Taken together, these comments must, understandably, make this past week Donald Trump’s worst since his bankruptcy – or perhaps his divorce from Ivana.

Like so many others with outsized egos and an irrepressible narcissist’s streak, Trump, like former Italian PM Silvio Berlusconi, has carried on as if all of his attributes are the very things voters crave in their leader. Comparing Trump to that former Italian prime minister, New York Times columnist Frank Bruni was moved to write, “Trump is Berlusconi in waiting, with less cosmetic surgery. Berlusconi is Trump in senescence, with even higher alimony payments. Trumpusconi is a study in the peril and pitfalls of unchecked testosterone and tumescent avarice. It’s a commentary on wealth in the Western world: how ardently certain blowhards pursue it, how much the rest of us forgive in those who attain it, how thoroughly we equate money and accomplishment. It’s a comedy. It’s a tragedy. It’s even a porn flick — or close to one. Trumpusconi stars overlapping cads who cultivate dovetailing images as epic playboys. ‘Best Sex I Ever Had’ blared a front-page headline in the New York Post in 1990. It ostensibly quoted Marla Maples, the second of Trump’s three wives, but a sceptical reader wondered who really planted that story, especially as the years went by and Trump’s boasts flowered: ‘All of the women on The Apprentice flirted with me, consciously or unconsciously. That’s to be expected.’ ‘Oftentimes when I was sleeping with one of the top women in the world I would say to myself, thinking about me as a boy from Queens, “Can you believe what I’m getting?” ’ ‘I’ve said if Ivanka weren’t my daughter, perhaps I’d be dating her.’” Now that is hubris of a rare type.

Meanwhile, over in that other party, the early frontrunner, and the person who was the seemingly inevitable candidate, Hillary Rodham Clinton, is now being chivvied and pursued by an unlikely pursuit from Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, as well as former Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley, former Rhode Island Governor Lincoln Chafee, and former Virginia Senator James Webb. While O’Malley, Chafee, and Webb have lit no fires with would-be voters, the same is not true of Bernie Sanders. An old-line socialist from New York City who moved to bucolic Vermont where he got started in local politics, eventually becoming the state’s sole congressman and then one of its two senators, Sanders went to the Senate as an independent socialist – although he caucused with the Democrats. He has only recently made the move to run as a Democrat in this race for the presidential nomination.

In his public appearances, Sanders has been drawing large, enthusiastic crowds. As the Huffington Post reported the other day, “Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) continues to barnstorm the country with crowds that top those of every other contender in the race for the White House, Republican or Democrat. At his latest campaign rally in Phoenix, Arizona, on Saturday, the presidential hopeful drew more than 11,000 people, who gathered to hear him speak about income inequality, money in politics, climate change and growing wages. ‘Somebody told me Arizona is a conservative state. Somebody told me the people here are giving up on the political process. That’s not what I see here tonight,’ Sanders said at the Phoenix Convention Centre, according to a transcript provided by his spokesman.”

Watch: Bernie Sanders Rally in Madison, Wisconsin

These crowds have cheered his message of bringing the big banks to heel, reintroducing the provisions of the Glass-Steagall Act that had separated commercial and investment banking (repeal of this law has been blamed by some critics as a major contributory factor for the financial crisis of 2008-9), opposition to greater trade liberalisation pacts such as the TransPacific Trade Partnership, concerns over climate change, and vigorous measures to recalibrate the tax system to generate greater economic equality.

Sanders would seem such an unlikely Democratic nominee (even older candidate than Hillary Clinton, coming from a very small state untypical of the rest of the nation, an avowed socialist, oh, and Jewish by birth as well) that many Democratic Party-aligned strategists seem to think his real goal is to goad the party into visibly embracing his set of economic policies, thereby shifting the party’s positions further to the left than it has been with centrists like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama – and thereby forcing Clinton (or any another finalist) to respond to the more natural instincts of left-leaning Democrats. Inasmuch as polling data seems to point to inequality as one of the wedge issues for the 2016 election, and given the continuing failure of the economy to generate rising incomes for an increasingly anxious middle class, the Sanders pitch would seem to be a potential strength for the party – but only if it isn’t somehow painted as socialism and growing government control over everything.

For Democrats, for as long as Trump is in the game and isn’t pushed out of the limelight by his entire party as it gradually comes to its senses, Democrats can reasonably paint themselves as the last protection against that avenging angel of rampant, unrestricted capitalism, and a candidate who would wreak vengeance on minorities and immigrants alike (thereby guaranteeing Hispanic voters have no choice in the election). In the same way, Republicans can find in Sanders the poster boy for everything conservatives and those fearful of change have come to loathe. Every step a Hillary Clinton might take in her rhetoric to placate and embrace Sanders’ views only heightens such fears and support for the Republicans.

The result of all this is one strange dynamic to break out so early in the election campaign. About the only thing that would be still more earthshattering would be if these two unlikely figures actually captured their respective nominations – and then faced off against each other in the election and in the campaign’s public debates. Such debates would be a real hoot, but don’t bet the store on that happening. DM

Photos of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders via EPA

For more, read:

• La Dolce Donald Trump, a column by Frank Bruni in the New York Times

• Trump Refuses to Apologize for Comments on McCain’s Service in the New York Times

• Bernie Sanders Draws Largest Crowd Yet In Phoenix at the Huffington Post

• Bernie 2016, the Bernie Sanders official website

• Trump: Make America Great Again, the Donald Trump official website