Lunging from one controversy to another
Republicans are reacting with shock and horror to the sudden news that their candidate for the presidency is none other than real estate tycoon and “reality” tv star Donald Trump.
The Republican Party was in turmoil again Wednesday as party leaders, strategists and donors voiced increasing alarm about the flailing state of Donald Trump’s candidacy and fears that the presidential nominee was damaging the party with an extraordinary week of self-inflicted mistakes, gratuitous attacks and missed opportunities.
Well stone the crows! It turns out the candidate is not a responsible competent grown up who knows how to behave, but instead, it’s real estate tycoon and “reality” tv star Donald Trump.
Trump’s top campaign advisers are failing to instill discipline on their candidate, who has spent the past days lunging from one controversy to another while seemingly skipping chances to go on the offensive against his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton.
How could the Republicans possibly have known this would happen? What hint was there beforehand?
Reed, who managed Bob Dole’s 1996 presidential campaign, recommended that Trump “stop doing silly interviews nine times a day that get you off message” and deliver a major address seeking to reset the campaign establishing himself as the change candidate.
If only the Republicans had nominated a candidate who wouldn’t want to do silly interviews nine times a day – but alas for them, they didn’t, they nominated real estate tycoon and “reality” tv star Donald Trump.
Friends and allies of Manafort disputed reports that the top adviser had given up on Trump, describing him as fully committed to waging a successful campaign. But they said Manafort has been frustrated by Trump’s apparent lack of discipline on the stump and in his many media interviews.
But Manafort, being Trump’s campaign manager, must have known this all along, unlike the innocent Republicans who had no idea what he was like until just a day or two ago. Manafort must be well familiar with Trump’s lack of discipline and microscopic attention span.
“Paul has good influence with Donald,” said Charlie Black, a longtime GOP strategist and former business partner of Manafort. “But he’s Donald and he’s going to operate stream of consciousness a lot of times. You just hope he’ll have more days on message than days on consciousness.”
You just hope he’ll have more days when he doesn’t freak out and launch the nukes than days when he does.
From Washington to state capitals around the country, a feeling of despair and despondence fell over the Republican establishment. Two weeks ago at the party’s national convention in Cleveland, GOP leaders were buoyed by what they saw in Trump. But Trump quickly reverted to his old ways, setting off alarm bells in some parts of the party.
They were “buoyed” by that? By that orgy of fascism and egomania?
I hope the alarm bells burst their fucking eardrums.
Gingrich said Trump is continuing to operate on instincts that helped him in business and in the primaries but said the GOP nominee doesn’t realize those skills are not adequate for a general election.
Of course he doesn’t. He’s not bright. He doesn’t think.
“He can’t learn what he doesn’t know because he doesn’t know he doesn’t know it,” Gingrich said.
So he’ll be a fabulous president then. I don’t see what could possibly go wrong.
We. tried. to. warn. them.
The pace is picking up. The more people push against Trump, the angrier that thin-skinned egomaniac becomes, and he cannot help himself from lashing out, which just brings out more people against him. It’s a positive feedback loop.
On days like these, I genuinely wonder how Trump’s going to make it to November. I know the Republicans have no mechanism for forcing him out so all this chatter today about how they’re getting ready to do an intervention or figure out how to ditch him is just that, chatter.
But seriously, there’s no bottom to the pit he’s digging. No indignity he won’t sink to, no epithet he won’t use, no wild idea too crazy and no way to escape the splash damage for other R’s in their own races. It’s a horror show. And worst of all for me, as a GC holder who’s not yet eligible for citizenship, I have to sit here and watch as more people than I ever thought possible are willing to vote for this monstrous person. I drive past 2 gigantic TRUMP signs on my way to work now (I live in a deep red state, for my sins) and I just wonder how it has come to this.
Claire @3,
I entertain a small amount of hope that this is the beginning of a spiral that leads to a sound electoral thrashing of Trump that convinces Republicans that there’s just not enough votes there to try to repeat Trump’s strategy even without the hamfisted campaigning.
But I doubt it. I suspect that, in the next few days, Hillary will order the wrong kind of cheese on her burger, or Wikileaks will release an email where she says something bland but nice about a corporate donor, and the media will fall right back into false equivalence mode and pretend these are equally scandalous to Trump’s behavior.
Then Trump will tweet something about killing all Muslim babies, and the usual suspects will say, “yeah, Trump proposing genocide is pretty awful, but muenster cheese? She’s so out of touch with the working class!”
Rinse and repeat until Election Day, where even if Hillary wins, it’s close enough that lots of 2020 contenders look at Trump’s run and muse “hmmm, imagine if I kept the policies and most of the racism, but ran a professional campaign and didn’t tweet stupid stuff….”
It’s incredible, but it really seems as if they are not aware of what they have been peddling all these years.
Crooked Timber had a long but very interesting piece on this, drawing parallels with the rise and fall of Joseph McCarthy and those who supported him until they realised too late exactly what kind of tiger they had been riding.
http://crookedtimber.org/2016/08/02/trumps-indecent-proposal/
I really recommend it.
No matter how spectacularly Trump implodes, he has a ‘base’ of angry, Fox-addled, voters. They’re going to go on poisoning American politics for decades. Like the Goldwater crowd, but ignorant and full of rage.
Adequate voter turn-out, and real journalism, are the antidote…can we get enough of them before November?
This. So much this. The false balance in reporting (on everything from climate change to evolution to Trump/Clinton). I was reading an article yesterday that was “well, some people say Trump isn’t fit to lead the country, other people are equally determined in their insistence that Clinton isn’t fit to lead the country” and the assumption that both groups had an equivalent amount of evidence/reasons to back up their claims. Everything equal. Both sides are passionate; therefore, both sides are equal.
The other thing is that we have been so immersed in the idea that the American people are (all) at heart good people who want what is best for the country that we are unwilling to acknowledge that there are people who hate for no reason (or for a strange, bizarre perceived reason), people who want only what is best for themselves, and people who actively despise whole groups of people and will do anything to make sure they don’t get anything good. No, we’re all just wanting the same thing, and interpreting the evidence differently based on our good hears and good souls.
I’m disgusted with it.
iknklast @8,
I know this contradicts my prediction above, but at least for now, there are some encouraging signs. CNN has started inserting factual corrections to Trump claims, with headlines or chyrons that say “Trump claims blah blah blah (he’s wrong).” On the other hand, this is the same CNN that employs Trump’s former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski and lets him make birther comments on the air, so it’s very much one step forward, one step back.
Oh, hell yes.
There’s a substantial segment of the population that wants to elect Trump just to “stick it to the elites.” (There’s also the thankfully small number of Bernie Dead-Enders who are willing to hand the country to Trump just to “stick it to Democratic Party elites.”)