Jeff Messer is the host of a daily radio talk show on Asheville’s WPEK (880-AM, The Revolution) that airs from 3 to 6 p.m. Monday through Friday. This column features posts from his daily blog.

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The following was posted on Dec. 15:

A new poll shows that Republican leaning voters rank national security/terror as their No. 1 concern.

Now, how much of this is legit, versus programmed paranoia driven by people like Donald Trump and Ted Cruz, is up for debate. But 5 percent say that it is their top priority. Things like deficit spending, health, education, etc., all rank in the teens or lower in the polls.

The GOP is used to selling fear and paranoia, but Trump is, well, Trumping them all with the fear and insanity. He is giving ignorant and hateful people permission to indulge the worst ugliness within themselves.

It is funny to see the rest of the GOP field have to flee as fast as it can to the center after having sold out repeatedly to the far right. Of course, they may pass Hillary Clinton on their way back to the middle, which is sadly funny on some levels.

You know it is getting bad when some in the GOP are trying to float the notion that Trump is an agent of the left, sent to destroy the Republican Party that was already cannibalizing itself. Wouldn’t that be funny, if it proved true? Sadly, it is only wishful thinking on their part.

No, the GOP has a problem. It has a lot of supporters who want hate and violence to rule the day. And if they are passionate enough to fight for it, they might get their way. Naturally, the mainstay GOP are trying to stop that from happening, despite having helped create the sentiment.

Of course, at the end of the day, at best, they represent roughly 30 to 40 percent of less than 50 percent of the population. It was recently calculated that, in a general election, Trump’s vast support on the right equates to 8 to 10 percent return come November. Not exactly epic, is it? Ross Perot did that well his second time around.

So, in spite of the media noise, there’s no real there there. And that should give us all some relief. But not the GOP, as Trump’s rise and rage have caught it up in its wake in ways that could spell a certain doom for the modern Republican Party.

Can they recover from this?

I don’t see how. Well, unless the rest of us let them. And that’s where I have to draw the line. We cannot — at any cost — throw them a life preserver. 

No matter how much they kick and scream, when they go down, we all have to collectively let them drown in a sea filled with the flop sweat and spittle of their own hate and rhetoric.

Ten years from now will not look anything like 10 years ago. And the sooner we all understand that the future is upon us, we can either work with the change that’s coming or be victims of it when it comes. It will be harder and uglier if we ignore the reality of the future. I’d rather get on board now and work toward it, than be crushed under it later due to ignorance.

America deserves better. We’re on the verge of taking a major step toward achieving that. And that step comes when the GOP comes to a close as a major force in America. They did it to themselves. Pity them not.

The following was posted on Dec. 9:

Trump too far? Latest in a long line of hate-filled talk

GOP Presidential front-runner Donald Trump has ascended and held onto a solid base of support, mostly on babbling nonsense and a lot of racist-heavy, fascist-light talk. 

And people of a certain paranoid ignorance have been lapping it up

 If Trump handed out arm bands for his faithful followers to wear as they take to the streets for racial cleansing after his next stump speech, don’t be surprised to see masses of people doing just that — oblivious to history and how it can tragically repeat itself.

Trump has now proposed banning people of the Muslim religion from being allowed into the US. Give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses. Only they are tired from being on 24/7 hate and rage, they are poor from voting for the GOP for decades, and they are huddle masses of armed gangs of vigilante thugs who are doing the dirty work for the peddlers of hate like Trump and Ted Cruz, and many others who are shills for the right wing hate machine.

Of course, Trump can’t implement such a concept. No more than Jeb Bush can “just tell” if someone is and honest to goodness  Christian if they say it is so, for the Bible told them so. 

There’s no way for this to happen. And it only makes it more offensive to consider that Trump made his big speech on the same day as the anniversary of Pearl Harbor, which led to Japanese internment camps in America in the paranoia and fear that followed.

That was a real black eye for America, then, and it seems lost on Trump that perhaps this is not something to try and bring back. But there he was, promoting eerily similar concepts to a frothing and rabid crowd of faithful supporters.

I have maintained for some time that Trump has hit the ceiling of his support, in the high 20 to low 30 percent range, which is culled from roughly 50 percent of the population being polled. If the two parties split the nation 50/50, Trump holds 30 percent of 50 percent. Which, if you think about it, is pretty small. Yet, he gets a camera and microphone pointed at him every time he opens his mouth. Recently, a few polls show him climbing up to mid thirty percent range, which may prove that he has not yet hit his ceiling. And news that Ted Cruz has passed him in one single Iowa poll, should give pause. Hate and ignorance are mighty popular on the GOP side of the ledger these days. And at least Trump and Cruz are milking it for all it is worth.

The mainline GOP certainly seem scared of their leading man, and his nearest rivals. They thought for sure that Trump’s wild talk would take him down early in the process, yet here we are six months in, and he is still in the lead with no signs of slowing.

Will his latest talk hurt him?

Probably not.

And the GOP are bringing out some big guns to try and take him down. I’ve seen Bob Dole being interviewed, calling out this new GOP field of hate talkers. And, if you want to know how desperate the GOP is, and how crazy Trump has gotten with his loose talk about walls, bans of religions, and ethnic cleansing, Dick Cheney actually came out against Trump’s proposal, saying “that’s not what we’re about.”

Let me just say that, if Dick Cheney thinks you’ve gone too far, you have gone too far — and then some. Dick Cheney — the man who gave us some of the ugliest, most hateful leadership in the nation’s history. And he thinks Trump is too far out there past the edges of the far right.

Let that sink in for a moment.

Will it hurt Trump?

Are you kidding? With his 30 percent of the GOP’S 50 percent, this is what they’ve been waiting for. This is their moment. And they are going to roll in it like a paddock of pigs in deep mud.

This is Trump’s America. We’re just watching the reality TV show version of it.