The prevailing moods
Nine days ago I published a column saying we had been set up for an 80- day narrative of Donald Trump’s closing the polling gap on Hillary Clinton. I surely did dread it. So now we’re down to 71 days and the predicted narrative has not commenced.
To the contrary, Quinnipiac put out a new poll showing Clinton with a bigger lead, 10 points, and invoked “the faint rumblings of a Hillary Clinton landslide.”
The old narrative was holding, to Clinton’s great pleasure, because it kept the focus off her foibles and made the race about the one thing that will elect her no matter how many people distrust her.
And that one thing is that Trump is … well … scary, nuts.
—————— Presidential races are about prevailing public moods. Trump is the agent of a prevailing public mood that uncommonly disdains politics as usual. But Trump also is the subject of a prevailing mood that is currently stronger. It’s that the idea of his being president is frightful owing to his oddness and instability. It’s that voters must save the country from Trump, which, by default, means a vote for Clinton.
At the moment, the national thrust is neither to make history by electing the first woman president nor to embrace anything Clinton has proposed. It’s to keep this guy Trump from ever being commander- in- chief.
So here was the new Trump plan for the aforementioned new narrative, one I praised as tactically smart: His new campaign manager would be the right- wing flame- thrower from the extremist Breitbart News, Steve Bannon, thus preserving an essential assault on Clinton to appease Trump’s rightwing base that deplored the moderate mushiness of John McCain and Mitt Romney. His new mainstream pollster, Kellyanne Conway, would keep that negative onslaught directed properly while helping Trump do what he simultaneously had to do, which was win back reasonable white college- educated and suburban and woman voters who embraced McCain and Romney.
That would begin with the issue of immigration. Trump’s wholly impractical promises to deport 11 million and build a wall rendered him hate- filled and non- serious in the minds of some of those white college- educated and suburban and women voters.
So how’s all that going? Not well, to wit: 1. Bannon, it turned out, had been accused of domestic battery and anti- Semitism by his ex- wife. People are properly wondering why they should accept that Trump is a spectacular executive when he keeps making weird hires at the top of his organization.
2. Bannon’s Breitbart News, an extremist site that abhors both leftist thought and mainstream conservatism, had published pieces representing some elements of what is called the “alt- right,” which extends to mostly dark sources preaching white supremacy. That enabled Clinton to deliver a powerful speech in Reno last week about Trump’s bringing previously hidden racism and other hate to the surface.
3. Trump’s new essential straddle, to soften on immigration to win new voters while remaining strident on immigration to hold his old voters, proved beyond his ability.
Indeed, such a task requires a master straddler— someone like Bill Clinton.
Richard Nixon could do it in a dark way in another time, holding the Goldwater kooks and appealing more broadly with a supposed new version of himself. Ronald Reagan could do it with actor’s lines. George W. Bush pretty much pulled it off by straddling one way as a “compassionate conservative” and the other as a tool of neocons starting absurdly pointless wars.
Trump can’t do it. Building buildings, avoiding taxes, keeping black people out of your apartments and doing reality TV do not properly prepare one for the elite levels of difficulty in political finesse.
Now Trump has some in his base thinking he’s gone all Romney wishywashy on them. And he has more mainstream conservatives scoffing at his conversion, especially since he seems to reveal it one day and overcorrect the next.
Meantime, Trump keeps tweeting. All the best expert political advice in the world about settling on and advancing a message can be undone by Trump if he gets his ego bruised by something he’s heard on TV and thumbs out a few fiery, exclamationpointed characters.
I admit it: I’ve come to love Twitter. It can be instantly gratifying. I use it in my work. I like to engage people instantly and publicly, and to be engaged instantly and publicly by them.
But a president of the United States surely should not tweet randomly and reflexively based on his thin- skinned snit of the moment.
Thus a candidate for president shouldn’t either.
If Trump can’t give up his phone, and if his people can’t take that phone, and if he lacks the discipline to let slights flow off him, then the “faint rumblings of a Hillary Clinton landslide” should, and will, grow steadily less faint.