Let me just say that if the choice is between siding with the man who was last in his class at Annapolis and the man who was first in his class at Clown College, the choice is clear.
But excuse Trump, he probably thinks the Hanoi Hilton is a four-star property he could buy and slap his name on.
And I'm not a particular fan of McCain the politician.
UPDATE: Yet it is hard to be too pro-McCain the politician, given he started the fight by saying Trump brings out the "crazies."
That's no way to speak of potential supporters who are frustrated that their party's established politicians won't discuss the issues. The appeal of even a buffoon who talks about the issues is strong in the short run, at least.
UPDATE: This is late, but very relevant:
To explain the inexplicable rise of Donald Trump is to calibrate the anger of a fed-up crowd that is enjoying the comeuppance of an elite that never pays for the ramifications of its own ideology. The elite media, whose trademark is fad and cant, writes off the fed-up crowd as naïve and susceptible to demagoguery as the contradictory and hypocritical Trump manipulates their anger. In fact, they probably got it backwards. Trump is a transitory vehicle of the fed-up crowd, a current expression of their distaste for both Democratic and Republican politics, but not an end in and of himself. The fed-up crowd is tired of being demagogued to death by progressives, who brag of “working across the aisle” and “bipartisanship” as they ram through agendas with executive orders, court decisions, and public ridicule. So the fed-ups want other conservative candidates to emulate Trump’s verve, energy, eagerness to speak the unspeakable, and no-holds barred Lee Atwater style — without otherwise being Trump.
Hanson points out that while liberal city governments are celebrated for "sanctuary city" policies that nullify federal immigration laws, no conservative municipality could get away with nullifying federal gun laws or abortion laws in a similar fashion.
A fighter without the clown-college behavior would get the Trump base rather quickly, I suspect.