The splinter is coming: the Republican race is a real life Game of Thrones plot

Donald Trump, the man who would be king, is pivoting from the ‘chaos candidate’ to a walking, talking politician as Ted Cruz schemes in the wings, plotting his convention takeover. What fresh plot twists await Republican voters?

The political battlefield is strewn with corpses. One man “goes into this thing, he’s competing against senators and governors at the highest level of our nation”, Donald Trump declared of himself in the third person on Friday: “And one by one they get knocked off.”

“Bom, bom, bom, bom. Now I’m left with two guys. Hardly two guys. Maybe you could say one. A half and a half.”

If this were Game of Thrones, the fantasy epic that returns for a sixth series on both sides of the Atlantic on Sunday, Trump would be describing some gory dismemberment. But in America’s Republican party equivalent, the businessman obsessed with gold has slashed his way through a field of 17 election candidates, as contemptuous of foes as Tywin Lannister, the patriarch of Westeros’ most wealthy family.

Lannister, at the height of his powers, met an untimely and unsavoury end on the toilet. And although he put rivals to the sword in the New York primary this week, Trump appears to be looking over his shoulder, fearful of his own political demise.

David Smith in Harrington, Delaware and Ben Jacobs in Hollywood, Florida

Published By - Theguardian.com - Sports New, LifeStyle News, Politics news, UK and world political comment and analysis: Saturday 23 April 2016 13.48 BST