WHERE HAS THIS NEW TRUMP BEEN?
BEHOLD the kinder, gentler Donald Trump.
The latest of Trump’s purported pivots is more far-reaching than a stab at greater message discipline. It’s an effort to make him more appealing to minorities and college-educated whites by adopting a more inclusive message and recalibrating his hard-line position on immigration. It’s nothing short of an attempt to engineer on the fly a “compassionate populism.”
Someone at the campaign clearly has run the numbers and figured out — belatedly — that Trump’s demographic base is too narrow to win the national election. Trump’s theory of the case in the primaries was that he had to light up white workingclass voters, and his theory of the case for the general election was that he had to keep doing it, only more so.
The new iteration of Trumpism is a lastminute adaptation awkwardly grafted onto the existing campaign and candidate.
On immigration, Trump appears at sea on a signature issue. If he cares about immigration (which he’d given very little indication of prior to running for president), Trump obviously has no idea what he really thinks about it, besides the most obvious clichés.
His most distinctive positions on immigration in the primaries were wholly impractical political symbolism. Now that the electoral calculation is different and there’s a little more of a premium on realism, they’re dropping like flies.
The Muslim ban has become “extreme vetting.” Mass deportation is getting deepsixed. Trump still insists he’ll build a wall and Mexico will pay for it. Two problems: 1) The wall isn’t going to be built; and 2) Mexico isn’t going to pay for it.
The dodging on deportation has been very public. On the “O’Reilly Factor” on Monday, Trump sounded like he was adopting President Obama’s policy of emphasizing the deportation of criminal aliens. Incredibly, he favorably cited Obama’s deportation of “tremendous numbers of people,” apparently unaware that those deportation figures have been artificially inflated by an accounting gimmick.
On “Hannity” two nights later, he at times sounded like Jeb Bush as he floated an amnesty — although he didn’t call it that — for otherwise law-abiding illegal immigrants.
Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s new cam- paign manager, is a pro who is trying to land the Trump plane safely after two pilots have ejected and the instrument panel has gone haywire.
On Tuesday, CNN’s Anderson Cooper asked her about the 11 million undocumented immigrants already here. She replied, “We need to find the mechanism that works and that is fair.” Of course, someone could’ve thought of this before launching a campaign that is, in part, a crusade on immigration.
While adapting on immigration, Trump is making a new pitch to black voters. This is welcome and sensible. It behooves a GOP candidate to make an appeal to every voter in the country, and Hillary Clinton doesn’t have the same deep connection to black voters that her husband, Bill, did.
Theodore R. Johnson, who studied black voting behavior closely in his doctoral work, thinks it could’ve been possible for Trump to get up to 15 percent of the black vote. Johnson’s research suggests that middle-class black males, in households with income of roughly $60,000 to $80,000 a year, might find Trump’s unfiltered, macho personality appealing, as well as his tough-minded mes- sage of self-reliance. But Trump’s rhetoric has been so off-key — arguing that blacks are so desperate that they have nothing to lose by taking a wild flyer on him — that he is almost certainly going to underperform among African-Americans.
George W. Bush got 16 percent of the black vote in Ohio in 2004, after years of concerted courting of African-Americans. For Trump to show up one day after running a consistently incendiary campaign and say, “Oh, by the way, I’d like to win black voters,” invites charges of insincerity.
That said, anything Trump can do to take the edge off minority opposition to him is a good thing, and seeing what he’s doing, some suburban white voters might find him more palatable.
Trump’s turn is an implicit acknowledgment that the Republican Party can’t just be a Trump party and hope to win.
If Trump loses, one of the tragedies of the campaign will have been that a more populist Republicanism could, in theory, have won over working-class voters of all races. This is something that should have been a focus of the campaign many pivots ago, if not when Trump first descended his escalator.