I knew a guy once, a part-time politician, who held a series of elected offices on the city level. When he wasn't steering a very small ship of state, he worked at the county jail. He was the property room guy, in charge of cataloguing the belongings of arriving inmates, and returning them when time was served. It was an easy job, and he did it for a number of decades. He was a pudgy, gray-haired man with a chin shaped like the narrow end of an Anjou pear.

The sheriff was a large, red-faced man whose hair always looked freshly cut, and whose large gold badge hung always from the breast pocket pocket of his dark suit. He won re-election every six years by taking things away from the prisoners. He ended smoking in the jail before that was common, and took television sets and radios way from the inmates.

"Jail shouldn't be a country club," he bellowed. Since all law-abiding, sensible, terrified middle-class people believe jail is exactly like a country club, he was landslided back into office.

Unbeknownst to the sheriff, his property room guy hated him very much, principally because the sheriff treated the jail employees' union as something else to be taken away.

When the small-time politician retired from the jail, he waited until he received his first pension check. Then, he announced he would quit his municipal office and run for sheriff. He knew he wouldn't win, since he was unknown outside of the municipality where he lived, but he had hatred and a secure pension check, and that was enough.

It was a fun campaign to cover. The challenger knew things about the inner workings of the sheriff's department, and he'd picked up a great amount of guards' gossip. He used it all, barnstorming happily about the county, embarrassing the sheriff with the indelicate details of county government. The incumbent sheriff spent a lot of time pouring denial into my notebook.

The incumbent sheriff won re-election after he announced that chained gangs of inmates would begin picking up trash on county roads.

It occurs to me, as the national election jumps from horror to horror the way a monkey jumps from tree to tree, that perhaps all Donald Trump every really meant to do was run.

Trump is a businessman and, while business people pitchfork money at politicians, they don't like politicians. This is because the politician can make people listen and the businessperson cannot.

Maybe all Donald Trump wanted was get a solid 10 percent of the vote and stick his thumb in the eyes of the real professionals.

Now he's stuck with it, watching in terror as he climbs in the polls, winning primaries, getting always closer to the job he doesn't want. His public utterances grow more boorish and threatening every week as he desperately attempts to drive his followers away, but it just won't work. Their appetite for debasement is bottomless.

Poor Donald Trump. If he's not careful, he's gonna win this thing.

To find out more about Marc Munroe Dion and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com Dion's latest book, "King of The World on $14 an Hour," is a collection of his best 2014 columns and is available for Nook and Kindle.