“What Used To Seem Impossible No Longer Does”: Donald Trump Could Actually Be The Republican Party’s Nominee For President
Though there are many Republican presidential candidates whose continuing presence in the race seems to defy common sense, last week saw the first withdrawal of the campaign, as former Texas governor Rick Perry decided to pack it in and sashay back to Texas. So we’re now down to a mere 16 GOP candidates, at least 14 of whom are hoping that at some point there will be a sudden and inexplicable surge of interest in the possibility that they might be president. Meanwhile, the two who are actually gaining support, Donald Trump and Ben Carson, are the most wildly implausible in the bunch.
Relish this primary race, my friends, because we may not see its bizarre like again.
The candidates will be debating again on Wednesday, and the RNC’s plan to limit and space out the number of debates seems to be working—if the idea was to heighten anticipation and the possibility that something interesting might occur when you cram all those contenders on stage. But unless you believe that Jeb Bush’s brain trust has come up with a zinger to use against Trump that is so spectacularly clever that it will be a rhetorical rapier driving straight through the heart of the latter’s campaign, I suspect we’re about to enter a new phase in the race.
In the three months since he announced that he was running, the tone of discussion around Trump’s bid has gone from “Isn’t he a crazy character?” to “Sure he’s leading now, but he has zero chance of being the nominee,” to “OK, he’s way ahead, but there are a lot of good reasons why he won’t be the nominee.” And what’s coming next? “Oh my god, Donald Trump could actually be the nominee.”
This is the point where, as a sane observer with a reasonable grasp of presidential campaign history, I’m supposed to say that as entertaining as the Trump candidacy has been, he can’t possibly win his party’s nomination. His support has a natural ceiling, as even in the GOP there could only be so many voters who will fall for his shtick. Unlike more traditional candidates, he won’t be able to put together the endorsements of key politicians and activists who bring with them the apparatus that turns primary voters out to vote. It’s one thing to lead in polls for a while, but it’s quite a different thing to actually get voters to push your button in the booth. Above all, as those of us in the know all know, eventually the act will wear thin and primary voters will turn to one of the more traditionally qualified candidates.
And yet here we are, and Trump is getting more, not less, serious. We keep thinking he’s reached his apex, but his support has only been going up. He now averages polling percentages in the mid-30s, and the only other candidate in double digits is Carson. Even if Trump originally decided to run as half a lark, he’s now most certainly acting like he thinks he can win. It’s only three and a half months before the actual voting starts—a period that will go by extraordinarily quickly, just you watch. Primary voters may well turn away from him for any number of reasons, but it isn’t as though millions of them are going to say, “Wait a minute—I thought Trump was a serious guy, but it turns out he’s just a blowhard! How could I have been fooled!?!” Everybody knows who he is already.
If you’re looking for someone whose candidacy will experience a quick fall, I’d bank on the good doctor, who knows as little about governing as Trump does, but has no particular argument to make to voters about why he should be president other than the fact that he has a compelling personal story. Which is nice as far as it goes (I don’t think anybody’s going to make a TV biopic about Jeb Bush’s inspiring journey from Kennebunkport to Tallahassee), but after voters hear it and say, “What a great guy!” the next part of the equation is extremely hard to come up with.
Trump, on the other hand, has an argument, one that may be even more perfectly suited for the Republican electorate in 2016 than most people realized. After seven years of all-out ideological combat against both Barack Obama and internal apostates, the case so many thought the GOP candidates were going to have to make—about who is the most conservative—turns out to be a secondary consideration. The emotions boiling up in the Republican ranks are dissatisfaction, disgruntlement, even disgust, not just with “Washington” and “government,” but with their own party and its leaders, who are seen as a bunch of ineffectual phonies who can’t get anything done.
So the guy who built a persona on firing people, not to mention on the single-minded pursuit of profit and garish excess, couldn’t have been better positioned to capitalize on the Republican moment. Voters may be deluded if they think that Trump is going to march in to Washington and whip it into shape, right before he builds a 2,000-mile wall on the southern border and forces China to give us back all our jobs. But when he tells them, “We will have so much winning when I get elected that you will get bored with winning,” it sounds like exactly what they’ve been waiting for.
Am I saying that Donald Trump is going to be the Republican nominee after all? I’ll be frank and say I have no idea (which is part of what makes this all so interesting). But what I can say is that it no longer seems as impossible as it did just a few weeks ago. Bizarre, absurd, horrifying? Absolutely. But far from impossible.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect, September 13, 2015
“Donald Trump’s Fans Only Hear What They Want To Hear”: They Don’t Hear The Policy Nuance, They Hear The Bluster
In a sea of signs protesting President Obama’s nuclear deal on Wednesday, there was one that literally towered above the rest: It loomed 12 feet over the crowd, with TRUMP in huge letters blazoned across a red background. The biggest. The best. An instant media sensation.
“He will confront these people,” said Ed Hunter, a 50-year-old contractor from Maryland who was holding one end of the giant sign, which he ordered off the Internet for $100. “He will not back down. He will not enable little special interest groups. He’s not afraid of anybody.” It was a popular sentiment among the several hundred who’d amassed for the Capitol Hill protest organized by Sen. Ted Cruz to protest the Iran deal. Trump may have staked out one of the most liberal positions on the Iran deal within the 2016 GOP field, and he may even have inadvertently helped the deal happen, but his fans don’t hear the policy nuance—they hear the bluster.
As the rally kicked off, cameramen and photographers and reporters kept coming up to Hunter and his sign-holding partner, Jim McDonald, a 70-year-old retired lawyer from Fairfax. Young men and women posed for photos under the giant sign, grinning broadly despite the sweltering heat. At first, Hunter and McDonald had their backs to the stage, so the Capitol dome would frame the backdrop of supporters’ photos. But before Trump followed Cruz to the stage, they turned it around so that The Donald could see his own name hoisted above the crowd. “I’ve been making lots of wonderful deals, great deals, that’s what I do. Never, ever in my life have I seen any transaction so incompetently negotiated as our deal with Iran,” Trump told the cheering crowd, standing in front of a Capitol dome that he described as full of “very, very stupid people.”
Cruz, who has promised to “rip up and rescind” the Iran deal, could easily have attacked Trump for being soft on the issue. In August, Trump said that he would enforce the Iran deal if it’s in place when he takes office. “I’ve heard a lot of people say, ‘We’re going to rip up the deal,’” the real-estate mogul told NBC News. “It’s very tough to do when you say, ‘Rip up a deal.'” Instead, Trump said he’d take a hardline approach to enforcing it. “I would police that contract so tough that they don’t have a chance. As bad as that contract is, I will be so tough on that contract.” The only other GOP candidate who’s been as moderate on the issue is Jeb Bush.
But rather than go after Trump, Cruz—who’s only polling around 7 percent nationally—is trying to ride his coattails instead, making him a special guest on Wednesday. Trump, meanwhile, reaped the rewards of Republican outrage over the deal by sharing a stage with the likes of Cruz, who riled up the crowd by accusing Democrats of financing murderous jihad: “You bear direct responsibility for the murders carried out with the dollars you have given them. You cannot wash your hands of that blood.” When Trump took the stage, he didn’t need to mention blood. He could just talk about #winning. “We will have so much winning if I get elected that you may get bored with the winning,” he told the cheering crowd.
In the lead-up to Wednesday’s rally, Trump had been moving right on the issue, writing in USA Today that he “will renegotiate with Iran” when he’s elected president. While that’s extraordinarily unlikely, it’s still completely in character for Trump: Somehow, by the sheer force of his personality, Trump will Get Things Done to Make America Great Again. At the rally, Trump promised that he will get things done with Iran before he assumes the presidency. “If I win the presidency, I guarantee you that those four prisoners are back in our country before I ever take office,” he told the crowd, referring to Americans currently detained in Iran.
Since Trump’s entire campaign is based on braggadacio—the swaggering response to anger, frustration, and resentment—his fans don’t tend to parse his policy positions very closely. In fact, gathering from those I spoke with, they tend not to even believe that Trump means it when he sounds a more moderate note. Howard Glickman, a 52-year-old Trump supporter from Philadelphia, waved away the idea that his man would be soft on Iran deal. “He’d enforce it in his way. No bull. Go in and check. Go in and do things,” he told me, echoing Trump’s own blunt vernacular. Glickman’s 26-year-old son Josh believes that Trump would go to even greater lengths to push back against Iran. “He would either write a new deal, or go to war,” said Josh Glickman, wearing a Trump shirt and Trump’s “Make America Great Again” hat, with an Israeli flag draped over his shoulders.
The truth is that Trump has arguably made it easier for Obama’s deal to move forward, as The Atlantic‘s Peter Beinart writes. His candidacy has thrust issues like illegal immigration to the forefront of the debate, taking conservatives’ focus off the Iran deal at the very moment that the White House was working to convince wavering Democrats to support it. Inside the Capitol, while Cruz was imploring protesters to “Stop this deal!”, Obama had already secured the 41 Democratic votes necessary to assure its passage.
Despite Republican promises, there’s little room for the next president to come up with an alternative agreement: While Congress could vote to reimpose sanctions on Iran, they would have minimal impact without the cooperation of China, Russia, and Europe, who would be extremely unlikely to go along once Obama’s deal is already in place. So Trump’s new vow to make an alternative deal magically appear isn’t any more implausible than the promises made by the rest of the Republican field on Iran.
Jay Smith, an 80-year-old from Baltimore who has a party supplies business, isn’t particularly concerned about all that. When I recounted Trump’s moderate remarks from August to him, Smith said he simply doesn’t believe that Trump would ever enforce the president’s deal. “I don’t accept what you’re saying,” said Smith, a fan of Trump who’s undecided about the 2016 race. “Every time he speaks, he says it’s the worst deal in the world.”
Suzy Khimm, Senior Editor, The New Republic, September 10, 2015
“What The RNC’s Pathetic Loyalty Pledge Says About The GOP”: They’d All Endorse Charles Manson If He Were Running Against Hillary Clinton
Some news outlets are reporting that Donald Trump will sign the loyalty pledge that the Republican National Committee has demanded of its candidates, in an apparent effort to foreclose the possibility that Trump will run as a third-party candidate if he doesn’t win the GOP nomination. Trump has scheduled a news conference for this afternoon where he’ll make his announcement.
Something tells me that Trump figures that by the time the party gets its nominee, either it’ll be him, or he’ll be bored of running for president by then and won’t want to bother running a long-shot third party candidacy almost sure to fail. On the other hand, if he really wanted to break the pledge because America so desperately needs his super-classy, gold-plated leadership, then he would do it in an instant.
But beyond the question of whether Trump will honor the pledge, this whole affair is an excellent demonstration of just how limited the modern political party’s power is.
Back in the good old days, parties picked their presidential nominees in the proverbial smoke-filled room, where the bigwigs would get together and make whatever choice they thought was best. There was plenty of factional maneuvering, infighting and intrigue, but the voters were only a tangential part of the process. Then between the 1968 and 1972 elections, both parties reformed their nomination processes to ensure that convention delegates would be selected by primaries and caucuses, which delivered power into the voters’ hands. That meant that anybody could run and potentially win, whether he had the support of the party establishment or not. When the 2010 Citizens United decision created a wide-open campaign finance system, the ability of the establishment to guide and shape the nominating contest was reduced even further, because now anyone with a billionaire buddy or two can wage a strong campaign whether they have the support of party leaders or not.
That doesn’t mean that those party leaders have no more influence. They can still deliver key endorsements, raise money, and help candidates move voters to the polls. But in the face of a phenomenon like Donald Trump, none of the tools at their disposal seem to mean very much. Just look at how that establishment helped Jeb Bush raised $100 million, a “shock and awe” campaign that was supposed to drive other candidates from the race and make Jeb the obvious nominee. It’s not exactly working out as planned; in the current pollster.com average, Jeb is in third place behind Trump and Ben Carson, with an underwhelming eight percent support.
Trump, on the other hand, doesn’t need anyone else’s money, doesn’t care about who endorses him, and gets more free media attention than pretty much everyone else combined every time he opens his mouth. If this race comes down to a contest between someone like Bush and someone like Carson, the establishment could help tilt the field in Bush’s favor. But against Trump they’re almost powerless.
The loyalty pledge was sent to all the candidates, and as of yet none of them have said they won’t sign. And why would they? It isn’t as though Marco Rubio or Scott Walker is going to wage an independent campaign for president if they fail to get the party’s nomination. Of course, that means that they’ll be promising to support Trump if he’s the nominee, which might be a little distasteful, but all of them would endorse Charles Manson if he were running against Hillary Clinton.
Since the pledge would be happily violated by the only candidate who it was designed to constrain in the first place, it has little practical significance. But it does make the Republican Party look pathetic. They’re so scared of the guy leading their primary race (as well they should be) that they have to beg him to pinkie-swear that he won’t turn around and screw them over in the general election if they’re lucky enough for him not to be their nominee. But their real problem may be that by the time they get there, he will have already done enough damage that it’ll be too late.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Plum Line Blog, The Washington Post, September 3, 2015
“Richard Trumka Unloads On Trump”: ‘Racist’, ‘Dangerous’ And ‘Un-American’
The nation’s top labor leader Tuesday morning blasted GOP front-runner Donald Trump’s comments about Mexican immigrants as “dangerous,” “racist” and “un-American.”
Speaking at a press breakfast organized by the Christian Science Monitor, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka was – no surprise – critical of the entire GOP field, but he used his harshest language for Trump, the real estate magnate/reality TV star who has stunningly risen to a dominant position in the GOP presidential field powered at least in part by his offensive rhetoric about immigrants in this country without legal status, asserting that Mexico is “sending people” who are criminals, drug mules and “rapists.”
“What Donald Trump started with immigration is dangerous,” Trumka said. “I think it’s un-American and I think it’s racist. It’s saying that one group of people is superior to another group of people. And look what it’s done to the other candidates.” He noted former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush’s ongoing use of the term “anchor babies,” that former Texas Gov. Rick Perry has referred to illegal immigrants as a “disease” and that New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie suggested that immigrants into this country be tracked like FedEx packages. (Ummm, how would that work exactly? Would everyone coming into the country have RFID transponders implanted in them? Bar code tattoos – aka the “mark of the beast“?!?)
Trumka said that the danger of Trump lies in mainstreaming his toxic views. “When the leading candidate for one of the parties talks in an un-American, racist way it starts to become mainstream. Racism can never become mainstream. … All of them are talking about it in the same way now because in order to pander to the right they have to go so far to the right beyond what – probably – most of them genuinely believe, but if they intend to govern that way, that’s bad for this country.” He added: “Someone has to stand up and say, ‘Enough, knock it off.'”
It’s a strikingly tough denunciation given all of the talk of Trump’s nativist appeal specifically playing well among blue-collar workers.
Trumka was also unsparing in his criticism of the rest of the GOP field, calling Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker a “national disgrace” and saying that “one can only pray” that Walker or Perry is the GOP nominee. (Tough talk given the track record, but hey – maybe fourth time’s the charm?) He said that when Bush talks about income inequality he’s just “mouth[ing] words” and said that Ohio Gov. John Kasich – who loves talking about how his father was a mailman – abandoned his working class roots. “His dad’s sweat and his mom’s sweat put him in a position” where he could side with Main Street or Wall Street, Trumka said, and Kasich chose Wall Street.
On the Democratic side, Trumka warned that Hillary Clinton needs to stop avoid taking a stance on trade deals and trade promotion authority. “Candidates that try to skirt the issues, not talking about where you are on [the Trans-Pacific Partnership] hurts you when it comes to activating the membership and the general populace,” he said. “They want to know where you are, even when they disagree with you.” He added that if she can produce a credible pro-worker narrative, “she could catch fire too.” Speaking of how pundits view the former first lady, Trumka said, “Hillary Clinton needs to do A+ work in order to get a C. And do you know why? Because she’s a woman.”
Trumka said that Obama’s strong support of fast-track trade authority has hurt his standing among workers, though they still support him overall. Asked about a new Gallup poll showing a decline in Obama’s approval rating among union members to essentially its lowest point (the difference between his current 52 percent and his previous lows of 51 percent is statistically insignificant) Trumka replied that “what you’re seeing is the residuals” of Obama’s push for Trade Promotion Authority and a Pacific trade deal. “He supported it firmly, still does and we oppose it,” Trumka said.
And Trumka vowed a huge labor push over the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the trade deal that’s still being negotiated: “You asked me if I intend to run a campaign against TPP? Yes. Is it going to be intense? Yes. Is it going to roll out everything we have? Yes.” He noted that the union is still working on specific issues involved in the agreement, such as procurement rules and rule of origin details that labor is still working to influence. He also said that China’s recent devaluation of its currency had raised old issues about currency manipulation rules being in the agreement. “If it’s an acceptable bill we’ll run a campaign to pass it, if it isn’t we’ll run a campaign to defeat it,” he said. “I suspect it’ll be a campaign to defeat it.”
By: Robert Schlesinger, U. S. News and World Report, September 1, 2015
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