Jim writes this morning that the audience at last night’s CNN town hall was a self-selecting group who turned out to be overwhelmingly pro-Trump, which basically turned the meeting into “a nationally televised live Trump rally.” As always, there was nothing Trump said or didn’t say, no question he refused to answer, and no lie too outrageous to put a dent in his audience’s support.
What is the appeal of Donald Trump? One common theme that came up, again and again, was his self-proclaimed skill as a negotiator. Trump styles himself as a highly efficient pragmatist.
When asked about Ukraine, he reframed the questions from moral to pragmatic terms. It’s not about “winning or losing,” he said, it’s about an outcome where “people stop dying.” And it’s not constructive, he added, to call Putin a war criminal because doing so would only weaken the U.S. president’s negotiating position. Trump said he can influence both Zelensky and Putin and, if president, would be able to get the whole thing sorted in 24 hours.
When asked about abortion, Trump said that — thanks to him — the pro-life movement can, for the first time, negotiate. He evaded the question about what they should be negotiating for (a federal abortion ban?), saying instead that he’d give the people what they wanted.
Even with personal accusations of sexual misconduct, Trump boasted that he could land a great deal for himself. In his deposition for the Carroll trial, he said that “fortunately or unfortunately,” he belongs to a category of men, “stars,” whom women allow to use them sexually.
As with the 2016 campaign, Trump’s brand is still the same as his book title, The Art of the Deal. This brand of politics is one in which neither truth nor decency really matters, only getting what you want. The single attack line that can work against Trump is convincing people of what Bill Barr said recently:
If you believe in his policies, what he’s advertising as his policies, he’s the last person who could actually execute them and achieve them.
He does not have the discipline. He does not have the ability for strategic thinking and linear thinking, or setting priorities or how to get things done in the system.
It’s a horror show, you know, when he’s left to his own devices.
And so you may want his policies, but Trump will not deliver Trump policies. He will deliver chaos, and if anything lead to a backlash that will set his policies much further back than they otherwise would be.