Una Mullally: What does Trump have to do to destroy himself?

Everyone remembers the bold girl or boy at school. Not the messer, but the real bold one, the pupil who pushed the boundaries to their limits, sometimes hilariously, and whose accumulating infractions lost the power to shock the more outrageous they became.

Meanwhile, the minute a good student stepped out of line they received a monumental bollocking.

“I expected more from you,” the teacher would say, when the good student passed a note in class or was late for assembly.

Meanwhile, the bold student is burning hash into an Actimel at the back of the woodwork room and is met with just an eyeroll.

It is unfair to hold different people to different standards. But that’s how we negotiate each other’s personalities.

Behavioural patterns provide a blueprint for all of us, and following those patterns we determine what is acceptable on a sliding scale of historical behaviour.

The person who always gets completely wasted on a night out and who then jumps on the hood of a taxi doing the Hotline Bling dance is not going to incur the same shock among their peers than if a well-behaved, introverted friend did the same thing.

When Luis Suárez bites someone, there is no novelty, he's a biter! But if Denis Irwin – who earned one red card in his career at Manchester United – ever took a chunk out of someone's arm, we'd have been baffled.

Sometimes expectations slide into the abyss, and eventually no amount of chaotic or outrageous behaviour can be matched with an appropriate reaction. In fact, the reaction itself becomes futile. How do you react to pure craziness?

That’s what we’re seeing now in the US presidential campaign. Trump is what the internet maxim “I can’t even” is made for.

His behaviour has not only lost the power to shock, but reactions to and retribution for it have also become paralysed.

Perhaps Trump’s campaign really will implode before November, but right now it is hard to imagine any single thing he could do that would actually derail his ascent considering the amount of crazy things he does daily.

The Doomsday rhetoric, the Nazi salutes from supporters at rallies, the baying chants to kill Hillary Clinton – what on earth could be worse than everything that's already happened?

We know that Hillary Clinton is no angel, but our expectations of her are so much higher, and that’s why the kerfuffle over her using an insecure server for her emails gains as much traction as, oh, I don’t know, proposing to build a wall to keep out Mexican immigrants, or banning Muslims from America. Nothing is rational anymore. There is no like for like.

Incredibly, allowing Trump to continue to be as Trump-like as possible (an ugly skewing of the “Let Bartlet Be Bartlet” West Wing maxim) has seemed to work so far. But surely it can’t go on.

Arrogant grievances

Liz Mair

, a communications strategist who has worked for Republican politicians such as

Rand Paul

,

Rick Perry

and Scott Walker, was on CNN last week where she offered some frank opinions to anchor Anderson Cooper about Trump’s current communications.

“It’s amazing to me that anybody’s still having a discussion about having some sort of an intervention or bringing him back on message,” she said.

“This is his message. His message is being a loudmouthed dick, basically, and going out there and offending people, and then engaging in a bunch of arrogant grievances. That’s what he does. He doesn’t have another message. He doesn’t have anything else he really wants to convey.

"The Republican Party has a message, but it's not his message, and he has no interest in carrying it.

“Quite frankly I think what we’re going to continue to see throughout this campaign . . . [is] the Republican nominee basically acting as if he’s on a suicide mission and aiming to take the whole rest of the party down with him.”

There are plenty of reasons to explain Trump’s ascent, but what’s perhaps more difficult to figure out is how he has managed to remain in the race once ascended when a fraction of things he has done or said would ruin most other political careers.

Every day there is a checklist of PR implosions and jaw-dropping, head-shaking moments from his campaign.

Landfill inferno

He has been described as a dumpster fire turned landfill inferno. When a landfill is mid inferno, a hose is useless.

All Trump will do is keep dousing it with petrol. Whether that results in an explosion is debatable. Considering his boggling number of crises to date, what does he actually have to do to completely destroy himself as a candidate?

He seems to not only be able to speed bump over self-made disasters but actually utilise what would be colossal screw ups for anyone else to his advantage. What would actually make America say “okay, you’ve gone too far”?

Kicking Mickey Mouse up the arse Bishop Brennan-style? Emerging at a rally dressed in full KKK regalia? Criticising Beyoncé?

In Trump’s topsy turvy universe, the most outrageous and offensive things seem to actually bolster him.

His audience’s expectations have become so warped that the worse he is, the louder they holler. To co-opt another West Wing phrase, what’s next?