ArcaMax

Some 55 percent thought his references to immigrants as rapists and criminals was "insulting and racist."

Yet even in that poll of Hispanic voters, 14 percent said that Trump showed "guts to say exactly what was on his mind about an important problem (illegal immigration) we need to deal with."

Now we're getting to the true significance of Trump's surge to the lead in a field of candidates that is as crowded as a public school classroom in a low-income neighborhood.

What excites voters at this stage is not that Trump has much of a chance to win the nomination -- he merely holds the largest minority of votes. Rather, it's that he serves as a public megaphone for a segment of the electorate that wants their frustrations to be heard.

That's why details don't matter when the Donald is "trumpsplaining." That's my term for his relentless tendency to jump without a hint of self-doubt right into explaining things that obviously are completely outside of his personal experience.

"Trumpsplaining" is like "mansplaining," a term that some feminist bloggers apply to the act of explaining something to someone, typically a man to a woman, without any thought to whether the person hearing the explanation already knows more about the topic than the explainer does.

"Trumpsplaining," like everything else in Trump's hype-inflated galaxy, is the biggest ("Huge! Huge!"), boldest and most condescending tone-deaf mansplaining that any narcissistic ego ever produced.

Trumpsplaining describes how Trump came to Chicago in June and preached to my colleagues on the Chicago Tribune's editorial board -- which knows a thing or two about Chicago -- about how "Crime in Chicago is out of control and I will tell you, outside of Chicago, it's a huge negative and a huge talking point, a huge negative for Chicago." Huge, huge! Gee, thanks, Don. We'll get right on that.

Ultimately, I don't expect Trump to see the inside of the White House unless it's with a tour group. But for now, he expresses the frustration of voters who think the system has failed and that the "change" promised by Obama isn't the change they want. Who cares whether he has the facts right? He's saying what they feel.

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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@tribune.com.)

(c) 2015 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.