NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the air allegedly leaking out of the Trump phenomenon. Actually my thesis is that while Trump may be losing voters (which is hard to know, given his appeal to citizens not accustomed to polling places who may yet turn out for him), he is definitely getting pushback from rightbloggers, specifically the Better Sort who like to speak for The Movement.

There are and will probably always be gremlins who love how Trump sticks it to libtards ("BOOM: Trump Just Fired A 5-Word Missile Directly At Hillary She WON’T Want Anyone To See") and the libtard media  ("ATTKISSON: MAINSTREAM MEDIA IS FORCING THEIR OPINION ONTRUMP DOWN AMERICAN’S THROAT," etc.). And there will be, at least for a while, tweedy columnists who'll tantalize their readers with a taste of Trump (like Byron York, who starts one such number "As the Acela Corridor fixates on Donald Trump's proposal to ban Muslim immigration...") before landing firmly in a Questions-Remain fence-straddle. But now that Ted Cruz has broken through as the first actual politician to get in front of Trump since his summer surge began, you can already see the brethren treating him as yesterday's news.

Take Philip Klein of the Washington Examiner. He wrote "Donald Trump has already peaked" -- in August. Apparently abashed, he got with the program and wrote earlier this month:

I still argue that the fundamentals are that the anti-Trump vote will consolidate around a candidate as the field narrows, and that he won't be the nominee... [but] the track record of Trump skeptics has not been very good so far this unorthodox election cycle, so it's quite possible that candidates will refuse to drop out, and that by the time they do, Trump will already be off to the races.

Last week, Klein apparently got still another message, as shown by his glorious headline, "A Trump win would validate liberals' caricature of Republicans," followed by a essay on how the best people in the party are declaring Trump de trop. In a few months, Trump will be the dream deferred for some, and a more versatile sort of Rush Limbaugh type for others; what he won't be is the Republican nominee.