President Tr(i)ump(h) the Insult Comic Dog?

"You can't insult your way to the White House," Jeb Bush told Donald Trump in an early Republican presidential debate. Oh, really?

Trump has since seized a commanding lead as the party's frontrunner. Jeb Bush, who entered the race with the biggest war chest outside of Trump's pocket change, has dropped out.

Two of his remaining competitors, Sens. Marco Rubio of Florida and Ted Cruz of Texas, belatedly are trying to bully the Donald. That's a tough battle. History may well remember Trump's campaign as an ongoing imitation of his near-namesake, the foul-mouthed, cigar-chomping puppet Triumph the Insult Comic Dog.

It works because, despite his lack of experience in public office -- or, for that matter, public service -- Trump has studied the political scene closely over the past two decades as he contemplated and repeatedly backed away from the presidential run he finally is making now.

Why now? Why not? As the world can see, the Republicans have been limping through an odd state of disarray for years. They control most of the state governments and both houses of Congress, but they've lost the popular vote in five of the past six presidential races.

National leaders in the Grand Old Party urge outreach to women and minorities. Trump has taken an alternative path urged by numerous hard-core right-wingers: Beat the bushes to roust out conservatives who have stayed home on Election Day out of dismay and outright anger with a Washington that they feel has sold them out.

That's why the Donald has carved out what amounts to a third party in the making: tougher on illegal immigration and foreign trade deals, for example, than the conservative think-tank establishment but also more protective of Social Security, Medicare and other entitlements.

But before Trump could sell his agenda to the public he had to get our attention. That's where his insult-dog act came in. He astonished us with his affronts to Fox News' Megyn Kelly, a disabled New York Times reporter, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and other POWs and a growing list of other targets.

"Trump is what the psychologists call the 'empathic bully'," said best-selling human-behavior author Malcolm Gladwell on "The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore" the night after Super Tuesday.

It sounds odd to put "bully" together with "empathy." But as Gladwell explained, the ability to understand what and how others feel is very helpful to the bully who wants to read your weaknesses and exploit them to make you feel that much worse.

"The best bullies are people who are brilliant at reading your weaknesses and exploiting them," Gladwell said. "When (Trump) makes fun of the other candidates, it's not some bad crude insult. It's actually an insult that cuts into the quick of who they are."

So when he called Jeb Bush "low energy," the son and brother of former presidents suddenly seemed to become more low-energy in public and probably in his self-perceptions, too -- right up to his famously sad request to a small New Hampshire audience, "Please clap."

We should have seen this coming. Trump loves professional wrestling. He's co-sponsored "Wrestlemania" events and even performed, playing -- who else? -- himself.

And it works for the same reason that the Wharton-educated billionaire often talks like a lunch bucket-carrying blue collar worker from Queens. When he recently said, "I love the poorly educated," he sounded like he meant it.

Of course, Bush, Rubio and Cruz have tried belatedly to return fire. But the insult is not a game for the squeamish or ill-prepared. Trump's skills come from decades of his strategic obnoxiousness.

That's why, instead of calling Rubio inexperienced, Trump talks about how the Floridian "sweats a lot." When conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt asked Trump in another debate about his overdue promise to release his tax returns, Trump responded by belittling Hewitt's audience ratings.

And when Mitt Romney courageously stood up and denounced Trump as a "phony," "a fraud" and a danger to democracy, Trump pointedly called Romney a "stiff" and a "choke artist" who "failed horribly" in his 2012 election bid "that he should have won."

But Mitt did the right thing. Good people need to speak up against Trump's put-downs.

Otherwise, if he really does insult his way to the White House, brace yourself. Every future presidential debate will sound like Wrestlemania.

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