Donald Trump’s campaign is flailing. The most recent polls showing Hillary Clinton with an embarrassing lead over Donald. In fact, he’s polling so poorly with the black vote, a group he swore he could get 25% of, that in the most recent poll, literally only 1 black respondent supported Trump. One.
The headlines across the internet fall into three categories. “Wow, Trump is really doing poorly“, “Trump is totally on message EVERYTHING IS FINE,” or “Here’s what Trump must do to turn things around.”
The third category is particularly laughable and must be addressed.
I don’t understand how after all this time, after everything we’ve seen, after everything he’s said, that these ostensibly intelligent people could say the problem is “message discipline.”
Now look, I’m not against strong and disciplined messaging. I’ve written about it before. I work in the field of presenting messages to the public. I get it. I get it. Believe me I do.
But Trump is not some novice that is off his message. He’s not a guy who really needs a prompter to stay focused.
Donald Trump is a trainwreck of ADD, inappropriate outbursts, narcissism and sociopathy.
Trying to limit Donald to the messages that would resonate with larger portions of the electorate and keep him off of those tangents that get him in so much trouble with the media would be antithetical to his entire persona and, from his point of view, exactly the opposite of what got him where he is. Why would he stop what’s worked so far? More to the point, why and how would a guy who has always done things his own way suddenly conform? He won’t!
But amazingly, the big thinkers of the party keep trying. Here’s Karl Rove talking about having a “disciplined campaign” to win, while ignoring the fact that a disciplined campaign is meaningless without a disciplined candidate.
Rudy Giuliani swears to God that a new and improved Trump is coming.
The changes come as rumors that Republican leaders are mounting an “intervention” in an attempt to have Trump to accept professional political advice and embrace a less confrontational campaign style amidst flagging poll numbers and low morale in the party.
Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who has close ties to Trump and is a top advisor on terrorism and national security issues, rejected the description of the shift as the result of an “intervention,” as reported by NBC News.
“I wouldn’t use the word ‘intervention,’ because it’s a word to describe what’s done for drug addicts and alcoholics, and Trump is neither of those two things,” Giuliani told NJ Advance Media on Wednesday evening.
“But I think you’re going to see Donald Trump campaigning in a somewhat different way going forward — an evolution that will focus much more on the positive than the negative,” he said.
But while Rove and Priebus and Giuliani are all talking about how things will change, Trump seems to have missed the memo. Instead, he was doing an interview with the Washington Post where he not only refuses to endorse House Speaker Paul Ryan, but childishly uses the same language back at him that Ryan had originally used at Trump: “I’m just not there yet.” Then he spent half of the rest of the interview being distracted by his own glorious image on tv and giving non-answers to everything he could.
It seems like Mike Pence, Trump’s own running mate, is the only one who is aware that the only way to have a disciplined campaign is to do things in spite of Trump. He won’t endorse McCain and Ryan? Fine, Pence will in a separate release. He won’t respond to the Kahn family correctly? Fine, Pence will.
I don’t want Trump to win so I almost hesitate to point this out to the campaign, but how do you not see how this works? In Trump’s world, your job is to swallow your pride, accept your embarrassing role of water carrier, lie to the press and always pretend Trump has the right position even when it is absurdly obvious that he doesn’t. It’s the Trump Way® and it’s worked for almost a year now.
But instead they keep going back to trying to change him. Honestly, Donald Trump himself tells an old story that highlights what the GOP intelligentsia continually misses.
“You knew damn well I was a snake before you took me in.”
So if these guys want to win, it’s simple. Accept that Trump is a snake and get ready to be Baghdad Bob every time he bites someone. Hey, you won’t fool everyone but then you don’t need to, do you?
Have fun!
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