Trump is so yuge, he doesn’t even have to show up #AlwaysTrump

NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. — Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump.

Can any conversation of more than 45 seconds’ duration fail to turn to le sujet Trump? Trump is the Monty Python Foot of American discourse. He drops in from outside the frame and squashes everything beneath his mighty sole. The quick brown Trump jumped over the lazy Trump dog. “Hurrah, my wife gave birth! Our darling baby weighs Trump pounds and Trump ounces.” Sunrise tomorrow will be Trump o’clock, the weatherman is calling for a partly Trumpy day, you can read about it in the Trumpington Post on the way home.

Wake up and smell the coffee: It’s morning in Trumpmerica.

Saturday, Donald J. Trump didn’t even show up here at the Conservative Political Action Conference, the annual jamboree of awkwardly overenthusiastic right-wingers parked in an eerily tidy, Disney-looking little village called National Harbor, a quarantine-safe outpost across from Washington in a bend of the Potomac River.

Trump has gotten so yuge he didn’t even have to show up to rule CPAC. He may or may not be president someday, but does it matter? He’s already ruler of the imagination, suzerain of the psyche — he’s the King. And not just any king: Henry VIII. He has turned America into his Hampton Court. Just as every peasant and lord of Henry’s universe wondered, “Where’s the king? What’s he thinking? When will he come back? Will he be in a good mood when he does? Will he have some knave’s head chopped off, make merry with a saucy wench, or just order the castle to be picked up and moved three feet to the east? If so, how soon can we make that happen?”

If Henry were alive today, he’d say things like, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters,” and everyone would shrug because it would be a true statement. The way Trump named a water bottle “Rubio” and tossed it over his shoulder is exactly the way Henry VIII would throw his chicken bones on the scrap heap at the banquet.

Trump even has a feud with the pope. Since 1527, how many other guys have gotten in a fight with the pope? And who else won?

Trump’s CPAC no-show had a direct cause. On Thursday, the first day of the three-day hootenanny, Sean Hannity played emcee. He asked the crowd in a gigantic ballroom to react as they chose while he named in succession each of the four remaining Republican presidential candidates. Ted Cruz? Huge, thunderous cheering. Marco Rubio? A good solid round of applause. John Kasich? Whatever, clap clap. Trump? Hundreds of loud boos. Only a handful of cheers.

A fellow known as “1776 Man,” whose thing is to stroll around the convention in a Revolutionary War tricorn, announced he was going to stage a dramatic walkout at Trump’s planned 8:30 Saturday-morning appearance. The one for which Secret Service agents advised guests to show up at 5 a.m. And Trump, who had originally accepted the CPAC invite within 15 minutes of receiving it, instead declared he’d be spending the day in Wichita instead.

Trump is wary of 1776 Guy? The Times Square Spider-Man of National Harbor? Disappointing. Couldn’t he be a bit more Vladimir Putin about it — just poison the guy with radioactive sushi and be done with it? It seemed off-topic for Trump to do Wichita instead of . . . well, anything. Unless he was going there to try out some new Trumpisms. (“You call these buildings? I’ve built doghouses taller than your tallest skyscraper!”)

But Trump’s backing out of CPAC doesn’t matter. He’s the Teflon Don. He’s rubber, you’re glue, everything you say bounces off him and sticks to you. He emerges from every mud wrestling bout like John Candy in “Stripes” — grinning wildly and clutching the girls’ bikini tops.

Friday night at the bar, a political veteran who supports Ted Cruz was muttering, “Our internals showed Trump at 44 percent two weeks before South Carolina. Six days out, he was at 25. Two days before the primary, the pope attacks him. We showed him going up to 31 overnight. Overnight! That was the only thing that changed. The pope attacked him.”

Trump won South Carolina with 32.5 percent of the vote, capturing all 50 of the state’s delegates. Attack him? He wins. Don’t attack him? He wins. Ignore him? Yeah, right. At this point Trump could move to Mars and we’d still all be talking about nothing else. “What do you think the Martians think of him? When will he come back? Should we all just join him there? Wait, is Mars going to eat our lunch now? Remember that time he called a water bottle ‘Rubio’ and threw it over his shoulder? That was pretty funny.”

Trump’s absence left a crevasse in the CPAC schedule for Saturday morning. His Majesty was not returning to court! No need to rise with the milkmaids! So CPACkers decided to stay up late Friday night instead, quaffing strong drink. Quaffing, and talking Trump. Cruz supporters were wondering gingerly if maybe their guy might accept a gig as Trump’s running mate.

Cruz, who has a 100 percent rating from the American Conservative Union, which hosts CPAC, is this year’s guy. The crowd didn’t need to stand up to applaud him when he appeared because it had already been standing for five minutes before he came out. As if to underscore that we were no longer dealing with milky Mitt Romney, Cruz had Guns N’ Roses’ “Welcome to the Jungle” play him onstage.

“So Donald Trump is skipping CPAC,” Cruz said, free-ranging the stage in jeans and a jacket with no necktie. “I bet somebody told him Megyn Kelly was going to be here. Or even worse, he was told there were conservatives that were going to be here,” he said, to huge cheers. A few attendees started shouting, “TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP!” Many more booed them down, and the Trump fans were not heard from again.

“I’m told that Donald Trump talks a fair amount about immigration,” he said. “There’s a natural question to ask. During the Gang of Eight battle, where was Donald?” Well, sadly, worse than nowhere, Donald was funding the Gang of Eight. “He gave over $50,000 to five of the eight members of the Gang of Eight.” Cruz went on, “It’s easy to to talk about making America great again — you can even print it on a baseball cap. But the question is, do you understand what made America great in the first place?”

Yet Cruz didn’t burn his bridges. Under questioning from Sean Hannity, who appeared on stage afterward for a friendly Q&A, he declined to say he would never back Trump in the end. Cruz even downplayed Romney’s uncharacteristically harsh speech early in the week, sounding more Lite FM than heavy metal when he said, “I think the concern Mitt’s expressing is concern that’s being expressed all over this country.”

That was code. Cruz had already figured out that Pope Romney had had the same effect on GOP voters as Pope Francis. It used to be that if you needed a word to get the CPAC audience to boo, you’d just say “ObamaCare.”

This year it’s “establishment.” Voters were being quoted in the press saying things like, “We’re going to use Donald Trump to either take over the GOP or blow it up.”

Carly Fiorina gets it. At the Ronald Reagan Dinner Saturday night, Fiorina, as keynote speaker, took a notably mild line on the King. She lobbed a few good-natured jokes then practically pleaded, “Can’t we all just get along?” to voters eager to smash the store windows and set fire to overturned cars in GOP Town.

“I am not here to hurl insults,” Fiorina said. “I am not going to discuss the finer points of spray tans. I am not going to discuss excessive perspiration. And while I also have really small hands, I have a really big . . . phone.”

“Do not misunderstand me,” Fiorina said. “I am no Donald Trump fan. I did not vote for him in the Virginia primary. Nevertheless, I understand and respect the people who did vote for him. I know many of them. They are not racists, or crazies, or stupid. While many people call the Donald a fraud, a con-man, there are a lot of voters out there who think they have been conned election after election. They know what it is to be promised something and delivered nothing . . . If we want to defeat Donald Trump, we must defeat him at the ballot box.”

Great. And if you want to be the tallest person on Earth, just be taller than anybody else. Simple!

When Marco Rubio finally appeared on stage Saturday, very late, flushed and hoarse with the flu, even he stepped back from outright mockery of the King. He mostly pitched a sunny Reagan-esque message of lifting people up by getting government off our backs.

Rubio reverted to being the charming, self-deprecating guy he thought the voters wanted. A million years ago when he got into national politics — in 2010 — he recalled, correctly, that the political class was warning Republicans they had better learn to tone it down and step left. “The only people who thought that I had a chance lived in my house, and four of them were under the age 10,” he said.

But the movie this year is “Bambi vs. Godzilla,” and Rubio’s attempt to be Godzilla Jr. hasn’t caught on. He said, or hoped, that presidential politics is not about “how loud you’re willing to scream or how many names you’re willing to call people. Neither anger nor fear will solve our problems.” The crowd loved him (albeit without quite the enthusiasm it showed for Cruz the day before) and booed Trump several times. “It’s not enough to say, ‘Vote for me because I’m angry and over the top,’ ” Rubio said.

Or maybe it . . . is? CNN anchor Dana Bash, a much more hostile interviewer than Hannity, arrived onstage for a Q&A with Rubio afterwards. She wanted to know why, if Trump was a “con artist,” Rubio didn’t start saying this until last month.

“I didn’t get into this race to beat up on the other candidates,” Rubio said. The crowd turned hostile to Bash as she posed question after question about the senator’s reactions to Trump. “Why don’t you ask him about HIS policies?” the guy in front of me shouted. Because Rubio is not the King. He’s got the right ideas for some other year.

If the ConservProm is any indication, the GOP civil wars have a long way to burn. Kasich is sure he can win Ohio and Rubio thinks he can win Florida. If both of those things happen, all the dukes and lords may continue to fight the King until the Battle of Cleveland.

But at the end of it all, if you can’t depose the King, the King must be obeyed. He’ll remind the noblemen it’s time to remember what they all share, and everybody will saddle up to go invade France. If this election is about whether rank-and-file Republicans dislike Donald Trump more than Hillary Clinton, they’re not going to have a hard time deciding.