Could Donald Trump really become the first internet President?

On this Thanksgiving Eve, a glance across the Atlantic finds a resilient portion of Americans giving thanks for the ungodly blessing that is Donald Trump. Until a few weeks ago, received wisdom held that The Donald’s candidacy for the Republican nomination was on the verge of implosion. Time and again, whenever he said something stupid, or crazy, or plainly false, the death knell for his White House run was sounded. And almost every time, it was drowned out by a opinion poll recording a rise in his popularity.

So it is again this week. Trump’s predictably nuanced response to events in Paris and elsewhere has included: 1) advocating a database to track Muslim Americans; 2) calling for the revival of waterboarding for terrorist suspects, partly because “it works”, but primarily because “they deserve it”; and 3) sharing his memory of watching Arab-Americans in New Jersey raucously cheering 9/11.

If 1) and 2) are just the sort of mildly unconstitutional/neo-fascistic dog whistles you expect would boost a candidate’s appeal during this eccentric Republican era, the naive might have imagined 3) to be another matter. It is simply not the case that large numbers of jubilant Arab-Americans (if any at all) publicly cheered Osama Bin Laden’s hideous extravaganza of 11 September 2001.

Various outposts of the US mainstream media have rigorously fact-checked Trump’s allegation and found no evidence. But since a mass celebration like that on US soil would have attracted enough publicity to brand it on the memory, they need not have bothered. If Eric Pickles wrote in The Sun about the night he beat Usain Bolt in Zurich, and his 200m world record in the process, would anyone fact-check that?

Although Trump’s tenacious poll lead has been boosted by this nonsense, the fascinating question is not whether he will be the Republican nominee. Admittedly, there is a rising chance that he will (roughly 20 per cent say the bookies), and the received wisdom has shifted. Now a day seldom passes without one US commentator or another writing the identical piece about the need to take his candidacy, if not the candidate, seriously.

They explain that he has led the polling, nationally and in the first states to vote, for so long and by such a margin that he might well win the early primaries. Meanwhile, his wealth protects him against the lack of funding that usually eliminates maverick candidates. Whatever you think of him, the pundits parrot, you cannot write him off.

For what it’s worth, I suspect you can. Even if he does get off to a flier in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada, and however capacious his war chest, eventually he would face a mano-a-mano battle against a more credible general election candidate.

The smart money is on Marco Rubio, the Cuban-American Senator from Florida who lethally dismantled Jeb Bush with a couple of sentences in the latest freakshow to masquerade as a live TV candidates’ debate. The choice between a young, photogenic politician and a narcissistic tonsorial horrorshow is no choice at all. Those whose wettest dreams are screaming the “n” word at Obama and interning all Muslim Americans, though they make most noise, are not the majority of Republican voters. Or so, however much the mischievous internal imp might crave a Trump vs Hillary showdown, you would hope.

No, the intriguing question here concerns how a man who it seems must be either incapable of allowing a clock to strike the hour without telling a babyishly transparent lie or giving airtime to his ludicrous theories can be rewarded rather than punished for such behaviour. In an age when information is so easily verifiable, why do so many millions either disdain the value of truth or actively cleave to fantasy?

The George W Bushian concept that Stephen Colbert called “truthiness” – the urge to believe what your gut tells you should be so rather than what actually is – has been crudely refined by Trump. It probably won’t win him the nomination but he has expertly adapted demented fantasy into a Bizarro World virtuous loop.

First, you offer an idiotically rebuttable line. Next, when challenged, you play the “He who smelt it, dealt it” Trump card, by accusing the “mainstream media” of distorting the truth. Then you sit back and watch your support grow among a core audience which despises the lamestream media as much it scorns objective truth.

One of the great paradoxes of the internet is that we once presumed it would deal death to outlandish lies. As an echo chamber, it has given them life. In this sense, Trump is the first major political creation of the internet. He will not be its last. Others more skilful, clever and dangerous will follow. One day, one might even make it to the White House.

For now, give thanks that the quiet majority of Americans still respect fact over fantasy. But if by some malign miracle Trump does become the 45th President at the ideal time to lead the free world into World War Three, his first executive order should be to pay tribute to his voters by rewriting the words of the third, Thomas Jefferson. “We hold this truth to be self-evident,” The Donald’s Declaration of Independence From Reality would read, “that there are no self-evident truths any more.”