If you haven’t heard that Donald Trump is near the top of the polls for the Republican presidential nomination, you haven’t listened to any Donald Trump interviews lately. He would have told you. As well as how rich and successful he is. And how well-rated his reality show is. By the way, did he mention that he went to Wharton? (“I am a really smart guy.”)
Trump takes vulgar self-promotion so far, it’s almost endearing. If he ever runs for president — flirting with a run is a perennial arrow in his self-promotional quiver — he’ll bring the business background of Ross Perot, the outsider combativeness of Jesse Ventura, and the marketing skills of P. T. Barnum. It’ll be just what the country needs, if what we’ve always been waiting for is a mash-up of C-SPAN’s Road to the White House and NBC’s Celebrity Apprentice.
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Trump is scoring in GOP polls because his name ID is so high and the rest of the field has yet to generate excitement. In a CNN survey, Mitt Romney, a serious contender last time who is sometimes referred to as the presumptive front-runner, is at 11 and Trump at 19. In other words, a former governor who has been running for president for years is losing to the guy who runs the Miss USA pageant and apparently doesn’t know how many members of Congress there are (when asked the number by Time magazine, he brushed off the question as overly academic).
It can’t be denied Trump has hit a kind of discordant chord. At a time when the media and political establishments are in disrepute, Trump’s I-won’t-play-by-your-rules outrageousness must strike many people as refreshing. Watch him flummox incredulous interviewers. Watch him stomp on pieties (not to mention good taste and facts). Watch him never back down.
Trump reflects the id of a certain segment of populist opinion. Republicans have unfounded doubts about Barack Obama’s birthplace. Trump absurdly promises to become a personal Scotland Yard for the birthers, sending a team to hunt down the real birth certificate in Hawaii. People think we’re losing too many jobs to China. Trump all but pledges a trade war. People worry about American decline. Trump says we’re getting laughed at around the world and it’ll end on his watch.
People doubt the war in Libya. Trump says he’d wage war there only to take the country’s oil. And he’d take Iraq’s oil, too. Obama is groping for a doctrine in the Middle East. Trump already has one: Steal its oil. In Trump, Noam Chomsky will finally have met a Western imperialist truly bent on expropriating the Third World’s wealth.
The chances are that this is all an elaborate put-on. Trump no doubt relishes getting people to talk about his favorite topic — Trump. In true Trump style, he’s said he’s going to use his TV show to make an announcement about an announcement. Even Narcissus would blush at the naked self-referentiality of it all.
Except there’s one nagging sign of Trump’s semi-seriousness. He says he had a conversion and has become pro-life. Perhaps this is a genuine change of mind. If not, it shows Trump already understands more about running for the Republican presidential nomination than Rudy Giuliani ever did: You can’t do it and have any hope of winning if you are pro-choice.
Trump wants to be the anti-Obama. Obama is too soft; Trump is tough. Obama knows nothing about business; Trump is God’s gift to American capitalism. Obama is painfully thoughtful in his affect; Trump is brash. They share much more important qualities in common, though. Like the Obama of 2008, Trump is an arrogant celebrity with a talent for branding who knows much less than he thinks and vastly overestimates his ability to fix the country’s problems.
We’ve been here before. Give me humble. Give me boring. Give me wonky. Give me anything but another celebrity apprentice.
“Trump is scoring in GOP polls because his name ID is so high and the rest of the field has yet to generate excitement.”
It’s more than that.
We’re losing hundreds of billions of dollars of our national wealth every year to pay for oil and foreign goods. The treasure accumulated by the hard work of generations is being bled away.
We vastly over-leveraged our inflated real estate assets to pay for this as well as the housing construction boom, which has collapsed. Our national wealth took a significant hit by the mis-allocation of resources in the housing sector that resulted from our distorted housing market, thanks to government interference and sloppy financial practices.
We spent a huge amount of treasure to remove a brutal, oppressive dictator from one of the richest places on earth in oil wealth, but our leaders are too weak to apply any of this wealth to reimburse us even for the reconstruction of their own country.
The type of jobs that can support a decent middle-class lifestyle are moving overseas, and no amount of sending poorly qualified students to government-financed college educations is changing that.
And the government is sucking us dry like a vampire. As the American people become paler and weaker from loss of blood, our government vampire is growing bigger and healthier than ever, indeed more arrogant than ever, now seizing power to control and ration medical care for the entire country and embarking on statist central planning initiatives.
The ruling class does nothing about this. They pay lip service to this, but do nothing.
I strongly suspect that Trump’s appeal is that he gives the impression that not only will he speak bluntly about these problems, but he might actually do something about them.
It's not the lack of excitement about the rest of the field, it's the lack of effective leadership from the rest of the field.
“I don’t care who writes a nation’s laws, or crafts its advanced treatises, if I can write its economics textbooks.” So said one of the greatest textbook writers of them all, Paul Samuelson.
But even Samuelson didn’t live forever—he died in 2009 aged 94—and now others decide what the rising generation is reading. It is a fair bet that, on one of the most critical issues of modern economic policy, his successors’ books would not meet with the master’s approval. That issue is trade.
Although Samuelson spent most of his life promoting unqualified free trade, he came close in his declining years to admitting he was wrong. In a paper in 2004, he suggested that there might be some circumstances in which a nation did not benefit from free trade. His analysis was carefully hedged; but, given his unique status not only as a textbook writer but as the first American economist to win a Nobel Prize, the effect on the faithful was as if the pope had conceded there might not be a God after all. External Link
i voted for obama, never voted for a republican president and will switch my vote if trump gets in.
trump appeals to a wider swath of the electorate from wing nut birthers, the tea party, unions and disillusioned obama voters like me. that is amazing and republicans call 70% of their voters and trump an idiot when there is a weak democratic president that he can drum.
The NBC/WSJ internals show something is working for Trump. He draws mainly from voters with no college degree, and leads among both Tea Party supporters and “very conservative” Republicans, but his appeal, whatever it is, isn’t limited to the right wing. He’s also the top candidate among independents and Democrats who plan to vote in Republican primaries, as some states, including New Hampshire, allow.......
the trade issue sold right is where trump can round up well over 50% of the voters and get them from both parties.
america first is a we the people campaign factor 10.........
Trump is the only one who's actually challenging Obama on all fronts. Do I believe Trump will be the nominee, no. That is unless the others fail to actually challenge Obama at all. Just showing up is not enough.
We need a candidate that tells it like it is and also challenges the American people to help right the American dream for our children.
I'd take Trump over Lil' Barry the Marxist in a New York second, but he wouldn't be my first choice. That said, can we agree that the great William F. Buckley made a big mistake naming Kathleen Parker, er, David Brooks, er, Rich Lowry as editor in chief? Was Richard Brookheiser really that bad?
I've met Trump and he is a personable, seemingly decent fellow. Still doesn't make him presidential material any more then the rest of the current crop.
Give me someone like Obama (but with a 180 degree change on policy) who is nasty, cynical, full of hate and rage towards his enemy to his very core. The problem with Obama is that his hate and rage is directed AT America instead of FOR America.
If you work your way over to Drudge, he has an interesting quote from Trump in 2008 about the "evil" Bush and praising Obama.
"losing to the guy who runs the Miss USA pageant and apparently doesn’t know how many members of Congress there are "
Mr Lowry, Michele Bachmann is treated as a serious candidate and she thought Lexington & Concord took place in New Hampshire and that Swine Flu began under Jimmy Carter???
I have no problem with Trump being on a stage with other GOP hopefuls for debates. Humble smumble. But if Mr. Trump is paying attention, I'll tell him that he has no idea what we're really facing in Obama. This is more serious than simply a "bad president." This is a guy who has the mainstream media as just part of his outfit and who makes the worst liar you could ever imagine look like a boy scout. Every element of this man is a lie, including the "ahs" and "uhms." If you're not prepared to deal with something like that, don't even start. That goes for everyone thinking about running. McCain never grasped it, and still doesn't.
1. "Trump is scoring in GOP polls because his name ID is so high and the rest of the field has yet to generate excitement." Is this the GOP??? I view Trump as the Dennis Kucinich of the GOP and Kucinich never got above low single digits, did he?
2. Rocco: Brookhiser was one of the few POR non-jerks.
Give me Bob Dole. Give me John McCain. Give me Mitt Romney? It sounds like you think the GOP should try to win the presidency the same way the military is trying to win in Afghanistan.
Typical GOP recipe for disaster. Be effective and win but don't offend the people. Be politically correct and don't say anything that will be parsed and used against you. Only engage the enemy with one arm tied behind your back. Don't go in for the kill, just bruise the enemy up and call it a day.
The only way to win in the current environment is relentless pursuit of Obama and his policies and philosophy. If a few goofy things get said during the campaign, great, it lightens the day. Otherwise let's see who has the right stuff as they tour all 57 states.
Trump is a distraction, just like Ross Perot was in 1992. Trump has no political experience, and as much as we don't like politicians, they have experience in getting things done in a political setting. Trump has none of that.
I must respectfully disagree with WillH and jg bennet on the issue of trade (of which Trump's understanding is wanting). When we trade we make the best of use of resources. When we run a trade deficit, we are not sending jobs and treasure overseas. When we run a deficit, we are consuming more than we are producing because the right mix of productive factors doesn't exist here to satisfy our demands. (For example, when you buy a car on credit, you are running a trade deficit; but you buy the car because you don't have the right mix of productive factors in your backyard to make one.) When the US runs a trade deficit, it sends little IOUs over to China, India or wherever. In turn the US gets real goods and services. It is not we in the US who are risk. It is whoever is holding our little pieces of paper. If they don't behave themselves, we can inflate the paper out of existence or simple renege on our debts. Think of a bank: If I owe the bank $1,000, I'm afraid of the bank; if I owe the bank a $1,000,000,000, the bank is afraid of me.
As to why we don't have the right mix of factors in "our" backyard, think of all the environmental laws we have passed that have made enviormentally intensive industries more costly to run in the US, and think of the litigation that has made doing business in the US more expensive, and think of our whacky corporate tax policites that drive our corporations oversees. The fault dear WillH and jg bennet lies not with the Chines or Indians or others, it lies with us. It is our failings that must be fixed, not the fact that some people want to buy goods and services from overseas that are too expensive in the US.
Trump is not a credible candidate but he is serving a very useful purpose. In a very unabashed manner, he is exposing the shroud of secrecy that surrounds every aspect of our president. And it doesn't just pertain to Obama's birth (although unlike the smug punditry class, I believe there is a legitimate constitutional question about whether Obama,even if he was born in Hawaii, is a "natural-born" citizen and thus eligible to be President given that his father was not a US citizen). It pertains more to the deliberate opacity that Obama has attached to every aspect of his background and the collective lack of curiosity that our alleged journalists, once so willing to comb through Sarah Palin's garbage, exhibit on this issue. Keep it up Mr. Trump. You're obviously striking a chord.
Could someone in the press please ask Trump why he wont challenge Obama and
run as a Democrat ? He could be doing the country a big favor if he got rid of Obama in the primaries !
Ah, this is the kind of article and these are the kind of comments that are refreshing to see in NR.
Too often lately conservative (and NR) are squishy and muddle-headed. Trump is an unserious candidate and, so far as I can tell, an unserious man. Went to stump for Rahm in Chicago, and has donated to two of my state's abysmal representatives: Weiner and Schumer.
Obama must be defeated, and we cannot let the confused amateurs rally Trump to the nomination. No nonsense, thinking conservatives must come out against him. The worst possible scenario would be another 4 years of Obama.
Then again, would Trump really run? I doubt it. It's one thing to take on Merideth Viera or some CNN shill; but put up against a sharp, thoughtful conservative Trump would come off as the bombastic opportunist he always has been. Something tell me his ego wouldn't recover, and so he'll probably drop out.
Good Article and I largely agree. However it is not becoming to pretend DT intends to steal oil or to use inflammatory rhetoric to refer to his foreign policy. He has no intention of stealing anything from anyone and has been very clear about this. His intention is (in keeping with his character) to make deals. "You want our help? What are you willing to trade? We choose our own charities! We don’t have them forced on us by others!"
I respect this attitude, it is one of the pivotal differences between the left and right mind. Leftists need government to hand out money because they know neither us nor they would voluntarily support the “charities” they claim to support and frankly anyone or any organization getting money (including indirect financial support) from the government (except in exchange for real work) is a charity.
A simple amendment to the constitution would make it illegal for the government to give any money to anyone except in exchange for real work. Let the nation support the programs they care so deeply about voluntarily and see what flourishes and what withers.
Really why does anyone believe the government handles charities better than individual citizens would. Why should charity be exempt from “survival of the most worthy” as decided by the people? Sorry for the sidetrack rant but there is only one danger to democracy and it is the ever increasing purvey of the Government.
I'd vote for Trump, it's time to shake the cage and stop playing mamby pamby nicey-nice with the Dems like McCain, Dole, and 2nd term Bush. It's also time to stop screwing around with the Chinese, slap tariffs on them until they play fair, we'll see who come out better in the end. One thing Trump will do is lead and speak his mind, not read the latest Gallup poll and have some PC speechwriter craft some milquetoast platitude filled pablum to lull the masses into a coma.
obamanation's "budget" speech may have done some good. Yes, it was a shallow, dishonest, partisan campaign rant.
However, he also did a fine job insulting Paul Ryan and his serious, well-thought, principled, well-referenced budget plan. I am certain a large majority in the House were insulted too, helping to ensure they pass the plan today.
obamanation's proclamation to continue to spend and tax America to a literal death may also give Ryan reason to reconsider his statement he has no interest to run for President in 2012...stating his young family and their needs.
After listening to obamanation's immature, vacuous, "campaigner in chief" speech, he may well realize he needs to run to give his young family any hope at all.
Paul Ryan and Gen. Tommy Franks would be an interesting ticket.
Meanwhile, the buffoon Trump may do some good too. Let him keep after the birth certificate or lack thereof. Why it does not exist is a bit odd...unless it states "moslem" on it. Or maybe his communist parents knew that "faking" little Barry's US birth would get them US citizenship.
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