When you get together 3,600 or so conservative activists in one place — like, say Defending the American Dream Summit in Columbus this weekend, Donald Trump’s name comes up pretty frequently.
After those conversations, I see three reasons Trump could go far — or all the way . . .
1. Airwave domination: A question I heard more than once at the conference was, “Sure, Trump has a lot of fans, but will they really get active and knock on doors for him?” At this point, it’s an open question — but if you can get 30,000 people to show up on a Friday night, that’s a pretty good sign.
Whatever weaknesses Trump has in the realm of grassroots organizing, it can be significantly offset by near-complete domination of the television airwaves when it counts. If he needs to go negative on a rival, he can go negative on a massive scale; if he needs to go positive about his agenda, he can do that. He can turn almost any showdown with a rival into McAuliffe-vs.-Cuccinelli-level mismatch during commercial breaks. Maybe Jeb Bush or Ted Cruz could stay in the ballpark. Yes, running lots of ads doesn’t guarantee victory, but every candidate would give a kidney in exchange for a near-unlimited ability for broadcast and cable advertising.
2. Gaffe immunity: Campaigns usually fear the candidate saying something controversial, outlandish, or outrage-generating. For the Trump campaign, that’s a big part of the appeal. Trump has spoken dismissively at John McCain’s time as a POW, referred to Holy Communion as “the little cracker,” given out Lindsey Graham’s cell-phone number, and he once joked, “She does have a very nice figure. If Ivanka weren’t my daughter, perhaps I’d be dating her.” For Trump, all of this is priced-in already.
One could argue Trump has scandal immunity, too. The messy breakup of Trump’s marriage to Ivana and time with Marla Maples made him tabloid fodder for months in the 1980s. (That must be a sort of fuel to Trump’s fearlessness; when you’ve been relentlessly mocked and ridiculed, why hold back saying what you think? You survived, and everything passes eventually.) The Daily Beast story about a retracted allegation of a heinous crime would ordinarily destroy a candidate. (Think about one-time Illinois senate candidate Jack Ryan.) On Trump, it barely made an impact.
Ordinary campaigns fear the revelation of a sex scandal, shady business partners, or a temperamental meltdown caught on camera. Fans who forgive Trump’s donations to Democrats, his past embrace of liberal positions, and his refusal to rule out a third-party bid are not going to abandon him over any of those.
3. Tapping into the zeitgeist: You see it in the much-denied “Trumpification” of the other candidates. Most of the rest of the field, particularly Rubio, Bush, and Cruz, launched their bids with heavy doses of sunny optimism — my fellow Americans, our best days are ahead of us, etc. Except a lot of Americans aren’t feeling that way right now.
Enter Donald Trump, declaring, “This country is a hellhole. We are going down fast.” Right there in his slogan “Make America Great Again” is the assertion we’re not great anymore. And any Republican can point to a pile of evidence that the country is slipping fast: the number of Americans on food stamps, the workforce-participation rate, an Office of Personnel Management that fails to protect its most important data, a Veterans’ Administration that doesn’t take care of veterans, a Washington culture that protects its own and never holds anyone accountable. We saw Obamacare passed, even though it never had popular support, and now the Iran deal is about be enacted despite popular opposition. A lot of Republicans have felt an atmosphere of crisis since, oh, Election Night 2012 or even earlier.
But I also see three reasons Trump-mania may burn itself out:
1. Wearing out his welcome: While Trump has been a celebrity for decades, Americans rarely gave him a serious look through the political lens. He’s something remarkably new on the political scene — a populist billionaire, entertainingly combative in every interview, offering stream-of-consciousness commentary in his speeches, calling in to major news programs and appearing on television all that time. He’s devouring all the media oxygen. No candidate on either side generates that “what’s he going to say next?” curiosity.
But how will people feel about his larger-than-life personality after three months, six months, a year? How will people feel about his style when it’s not new? Will Americans want this in their living rooms for four years or eight years?
2. His overall polling isn’t that great. He’s still got some fervent Republican opposition:
A Quinnipiac national poll taken before the debate, for example, found that 30 percent of Republican-primary voters would never support Trump, the highest number among all the candidates. A late-July Fox national poll similarly found that 33 percent of GOP voters would never support Trump in the primary.
He’s got a 58 percent unfavorable rating among registered voters; 58 percent of registered Republicans and Republican-leaning independents think the party has a better chance with someone else. Among women in the sample, it splits 34 percent to 61 percent.
(Note Jeb Bush has a 57 percent unfavorable rating; a wise voice said to me this weekend, “If Jeb Bush gets the nomination, it means everything the Tea Party stood for was for naught. It means conservative activists don’t really matter, and we really are a monarchist party with a royal family.” If the race comes down to Trump, Bush, and somebody else, there are going to be a lot of Republicans gravitating to that somebody else.)
3. The 3 a.m. phone call: Who advises Trump on military policy? Perhaps no one, really:
When Donald Trump, the reality show tycoon turned GOP front-runner, appeared on Meet the Press this past Sunday, host Chuck Todd asked him, “Who do you talk to for military advice right now?” At first, Trump had no direct answer. He replied, “Well, I watch the shows. I mean, I really see a lot of great—you know, when you watch your show and all of the other shows and you have the generals and you have certain people that you like.” Todd pressed him: “But is there a go-to for you?” Trump said he had two or three “go-to” advisers. He named John Bolton, one of the most hawkish neoconservatives, and retired Army Col. Jack Jacobs, who is a military analyst for MSNBC and NBC News. “Col. Jack Jacobs is a good guy,” Trump said. “And I see him on occasion.”
There’s just one problem with Trump citing Jacobs as a national security adviser: Jacobs says he has never talked to Trump about military policy.
“He may have said the first person who came to mind,” Jacobs tells Mother Jones. “I know him. But I’m not a consultant. I’m not certain if he has a national security group of people. I don’t know if he does or if he doesn’t. If he does, I’m not one of them.”
Jacobs, who received a Medal of Honor (and two Silver Stars, three Bronze Stars, and two Purple Hearts) for his service in Vietnam, notes that he has attended numerous charity events where Trump was present. “I’ve seen him at a number of functions,” he says. But Jacobs adds that he has had no discussions with Trump about national security affairs—at those events or anywhere else.
Trump’s style is indisputably appealing to many Republican voters, but can they picture him in the White Situation Room during a crisis? Would he resolve the situation or exacerbate it? Because from the South China Sea . . .
China has asserted ownership of nearly all of the South China Sea and is building at least seven artificial islands in the key waterway. Parts of the region are also claimed by five other countries, including three of this year’s training partners.
U.S. officials say they do not take sides in territorial disputes. But they worry that China could use the new islands — at least one of which includes a military-grade runway and deepwater harbor — to assert control over air and sea navigation and have called on China to halt construction.
Not only are U.S. forces training with more countries in the region than in past years, but the exercises — most of which fall under a program known as Cooperation Afloat and Readiness Training, or CARAT — are more ambitious.
. . . to Russia and Ukraine…
In a speech in Kiev for Independence Day celebrations, [Ukrainian president] Poroshenko accused Russia of having sent a total of up to 500 tanks, 400 artillery systems and up to 950 military armoured vehicles to pro-Russian rebels, apparently talking about the whole conflict, although he did not specify the time period for these deliveries.
Poroshenko said that 50,000 Russian soldiers are deployed on the border with Ukraine and 9,000 Russian servicemen are among the 40,000 fighters of the separatist force.
. . . to Iraq . . .
U.S. military officials in Iraq have issued preliminary confirmation that Islamic State militants used mustard gas in a mortar attack on Kurdish forces in August, a Defense Department official said.
. . . to North Korea . . .
Marathon negotiations between North and South Korea dragged into a third day Monday, with the South demanding an apology and alleging unusual military activity from its northern neighbor.
The situation deteriorated earlier this month after land mines injured two South Korean soldiers. Seoul then began blasting propaganda from speakers along the border, followed by an apparent exchange of fire and North Korea saying Friday had entered a “quasi-state of war.”
. . . it’s near-certain that sooner or later, a foreign crisis will hit.
ADDENDA: I just got my copy of our friend Michael Walsh’s The Devil’s Pleasure Palace: The Cult of Critical Theory and the Subversion of the West. I think you’re going to enjoy this one like a fine steak. Take a bite:
Political correctness, for all its notoriety, has not received the full scrutiny it deserves, in part because, like everything else the Marxists touch, it wears a tarnhelm, a magic helmet — in this case, of kindness, politesse, and sheer righteousness. Busily formulating new lists of what can and cannot be said (lest it offend somebody, somewhere, either now or at some future date) and always in light of the Critical Theory imperative to be perpetually on the attack, political correctness’ commissars resemble no one more than Dickens’ implacable Madame Defarge in A Tale of Two Cities, clicking her knitting needles as heads roll into baskets. Common words, common terms, even the names of venerable sports franchises come under fire as they march ever forward towards the sunny uplands of perfect totalitarian utopia.
Michael’s book is hitting bookstore shelves now. I see from the Encounter Books catalog that our friend Jay Nordlinger has Children of Monsters: An Inquiry into the Sons and Daughters of Dictators coming out next month, too!