I am writing this just before the Iowa caucuses are set to begin. According to the latest polls, the GOP caucus is a dead heat between Donald Trump and Ted Cruz. Rubio is a distant third, followed by everyone else far back in the pack.
Over the course of the last year, no one has been able to de-rail the Donald. The other candidates have failed, even when they have tried (and most of them haven't). Ditto the media. Jeb Bush was not far from the truth in the last Republican debate -- the one without Trump (which also seems not to have dented him) -- when he said that most of his co-candidates were MIA earlier in the year when he tried to take on Trump.
Actually, Bush the Third said they were in the "witness protection program."
But, for our purposes, that's basically the same thing.
In any case, this teflon Trump has everyone flummoxed.
No one can figure out what is wrong with him, though all are certain something has to be. His polling floor (about 35%) seems also to be his ceiling, making it difficult for him to grow his vote. His campaign is based almost entirely on insult; in fact, the New York Times yesterday published an exhaustive list of all the insults he has tweeted over the course of the campaign, as well as all the targets of his vitriol; the list reads like it's the work of an over-testosteroned adolescent (which it well may be).
His policy proposals border on being stupid, whether they're about building a wall across the southern border (expensive and utterly unnecessary given the fact that more illegals are leaving than arriving), or stopping non-citizen Muslims at any of them (dead on arrival in any court and cat-nip for the terrorists), or repealing and replacing Obamacare (without remotely specifying what the "replacement" will amount to), or denying global warming. He claims he will create economic growth at the annual rate of 6%; the plan, however, is nothing but the re-jiggered tax cutting Republicans have been advocating and practicing for thirty years, and it has never done so.
Still, the Donald marches on. And the question is . . .
Why?
Here's the answer.
First, he is at this moment swimming in the smallest of ponds, namely, the GOP primary electorate. Over the course of the last thirty years, that electorate has become (1) increasingly (and radically) right wing and (2) increasingly (and disturbingly) angry. Though some of Trump's one line policy positions are not shared by all of that group (e.g., ending the carried interest loophole for hedge funders), his crypto-fascist xenophobia either is (or is ignored as a needed "conversation starter"). And the insults are simply embraced and adored, which is basically what happens when anger becomes a substitute for reason.
Nevertheless, 35% of the GOP electorate is about 10-12% of the country, and 10-12% does not an ultimate victory make.
Lots of nuts have squirreled away similar slices of the American electorate over the years (e.g., the Know Nothings in the 1850s, who wanted to stop Catholics from voting, increase the naturalization period from five to twenty-one years to stop immigrants from becoming citizens, and -- when all else failed -- actually kill Catholic voters on election days).
None of them, however, have wound up running the country.
Second, his current competitors -- with the exception of Bush -- aren't attacking him correctly. In fact, they can't. They all want Trump's voters on the day the Donald loses. So, the attack on Trump's temperament -- which in any normal year would be an immediate disqualifier -- is watered down. Instead of calling him a carnival barking, thin-skinned, dangerous clown who should get nowhere near the nuclear button, he is treated as an entertaining showman (by Rubio), or as "inexperienced" (Christie's take on the Muslim ban), or as just "overreacting" (Fiorina on the ban). The total cowards simply disagree politely (Cruz on the Muslim ban -- "that is not my policy").
You cannot, however, beat a bully with an airbrush.
You have to knock him down.
Third, because his current competitors are treating him with kid gloves, Trump has been given a pass on his putative strength as a businessman and deal maker, all of which is at this point assumed by anyone watching the coverage. The problem with that view, however, is that it is wrong. Indeed, as Tim O'Brien recently wrote for Bloomberg, "a well-documented and widely reported trail of bad deals litters Trump's career as a real estate developer and gambling mogul." O'Brien continued: "Fueled by a slew of bank loans in the late 1980s, Trump absorbed an airline, a football team, a landmark hotel, a bunch of casinos, a yacht, and other nifty stuff -- almost all of which he lost because he couldn't juggle the debt payments."
As importantly, on the only real-estate deal he tried to maintain over a period of years -- his plan to develop Manhattan's West Side Rail Yards into a $4.5 billion "Television City" that would combine residential and commercial space and provide a new home for NBC -- he was stiff-armed by NYC's then-Mayor Ed Koch and ultimately wound up with only collateral interests worth a fraction of his planned return on a project owned by foreigners. His response to all of this -- typical of him even then -- was to insult Koch. But Koch -- who could out-Trump Trump -- had the last word, telling reporters that the Donald was "squealing like a stuck pig" as his deal went south.
The lesson is clear. If Trump deals as President the way he has dealt as a business tycoon, we are in trouble. His deals are usually not that great. When they go south, he creates the appearance of success by plastering his name on buildings and then jumping on the gold plated jet. As the Texans say, he's all hat and no cattle. This won't work in the White House. All the people Trump is now insulting will be watching. And watching the Donald botch the latest G-8 summit (he can't fire Merkel et. al.), or budget negotiations (he can't fire Congress), will become a cottage industry.
The other lesson inheres in exploring why Trump's deal-making has been so poor. The underlying cause appears to be a lack of focus. According to reports, he is good for about a month on any one project and then gets bored. This too, however, is a character trait pregnant with disaster. Put simply, we do not need a President with the political equivalent of attention deficit disorder.
In his life, when the going has gotten tough and the deals have started to fizzle, Trump's default move -- packaged in an array of insults -- has been to bail. Is that what we are looking at here?
If so . . .
He may have a lot more in common with Sarah Palin than we ever suspected.
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