It’s only a matter of time but eventually history repeats itself and in Michigan politics it is happening again.

The current establishment GOP leadership is in deep therapy trying to figure how to handle Donald Trump. To be sure the state GOP Party chair and others have been tight lipped about any criticism, but Mitt Romney did the dirty work for all of them the other day by calling Mr. Trump everything in the book and then some. The objective was to block Mr. Trump from nailing down the party nomination.

And for those with a long memory, the state Democratic Party went through the same angst over a candidate who ran for president in 1972. His name was George Wallace and when the Democratic leadership woke up the day after the presidential primary, the governor of Alabama had amazingly won the contest. For those of you who don’t remember George Corley Wallace he was not exactly a supporter of civil rights for minorities and made a career out of advancing the cause of White Americans. Many called him a racists, too and like Donald Trump many of his followers were angry and like the Donald were prone to a little pushing and shoving when somebody disagreed with their beliefs.

So when Mr. Wallace sash-shayed into Michigan, UAW leaders never considered that many of their members would cotton to Mr. Wallace’s rhetoric and they delivered the state to him.

Just as with the current Trump phenomena, the union bosses back then didn’t know how to blunt the populist lingo of Mr. Wallace as they incorrectly assumed that there were enough anti-Wallace folks to deny him the win. Wrong.

Interestingly John Kasick continues to hope there are enough “sensable voters” that if he continues to play nice and not attack the other candidates that somehow or some way, he will win the GOP nomination for president. But the audience that responds to that, is minuscule compared to the masses that like what Mr. Trump is saying and how he says it.

And Gov. Wallace benefited from the same reality. When the voters like what a candidate is saying there is no way of ordering them not to vote for the person who “tells it like it is.”

That was the lesson for Democrats out of the 1972 election. Union bosses told the rank and file that Wallace was bad medicine and expected them to fall in line. Instead they got out of line and, bucked the likes of UAW President Doug Fraser who spent many years in the civil rights trenches fighting along side Martin Luther King but he discovered not everybody in his union shared his passion for that movement.

As a result, after he came out of his funk, President Fraser and other top Democrats in Michigan devised a system to make sure it never happened again and thus was hatched the strategy of holding presidential primaries around the country.The theory was, a radical candidate might win here and there but could never cobble together enough delegates to get the nomination.

Donald Trump has shown that an outsider candidate who marches to his own drummer can do more than win a race here and there. He is now at the point that anti-Trump Republicans, and you know who you are, are lamenting that they could be stuck with him as their standard-bearer.

Unless, of course, there is a brokered convention where the establishment could maneuver to deny him the nomination. And political correspondents can hardly wait to cover the revolt that would spawn among Trump backers.

So history is being written by Mr. Trump as he defies everyone who six months ago predicted he would imploded. So much for that.