President Barack Obama seems bemused by Donald Trump's insurgent campaign for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination.<br /><br />"He is a great publicity-seeker -- and at a time when the Republican Party hasn't really figured out what it's for as opposed to what it's against," the president said earlier this month. "He is, you know, the classic reality-TV character."<br /><br />Obama added: "I don't think he'll end up being president of the United States."<br /><br />That's been the conventional wisdom for months: Trump, with his bombastic, made-for-TV personality, is fun to watch, but sooner or later he's going to flame-out. Celebrated polling site Fivethirtyeight.com pointed out in June that 57 percent of Republicans disliked the real-estate mogul and reality-TV performer. "For this reason alone, Trump has a better chance of cameoing in another 'Home Alone' movie with Macaulay Culkin -- or playing in the NBA Finals -- than winning the Republican nomination."<br /><br />But it's now four months later, and pundits are being forced to reconsider their predictions. Because Trump, defying all expert opinion, is still leading in the the GOP polls. In August, Fivethirtyeight's founder, Nate Silver, put Trump's chances at winning the GOP nomination at 2 percent. This week he grudgingly upped that prediction to "high single digits" -- with a caveat. "There's a lot of existential uncertainty here," he said. "If you're being purely empirical -- well, nobody quite like Trump has won a party nomination before, or even come all that close to it. So there's some universe where his chances are 0 percent."<br /><br />Needless to say, that means there's also some universe where his chances are 100 percent. In short: no one knows what to expect anymore.<br /><br />David Burstein, founder of the political-reform group Run for America, believes we need to start preparing ourselves for the possibility that Trump will indeed win the nomination and go on to become the next president of the United States. Burstein has looked at the polls and the electoral map for Vanity Fair magazine and has concluded that "Trump is just as competitive -- and perhaps more so -- as either John McCain, in 2008, or Mitt Romney, in 2012."<br />...<br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AceGu46u-gg" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AceGu46u-gg</a>