From the first Morning Jolt of the week:
Three Forces Pushing Trump Forward
When you get together 3,600 or so conservative activists in one place – like, say the 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 Jack Ryan.) On Trump, it barely made an impact.
Ordinary campaigns fear the revelation of a sex scandal, shady business partners, a temperamental meltdown caught on camera. Fans who forgive his 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.