Why keep fawning over Trump for office?
The Donald is just a political gadfly
Just as I expected, Donald Trump has quit another political race before it actually got underway. After months of openly fueling speculation that he would seek the Republican Party’s nomination for governor of New York, The Donald announced last week that he is dropping out of the GOP primary contest that he never really entered.
“While I won’t be running for governor of New York state, a race I would have won, I have much bigger plans in mind — stay tuned,” Trump said in a tweet.
That’s Trump’s modus operandi. When it comes to competing for elected office, he has always been all talk and no action. By now, you’d think the entrepreneur and reality TV show host would be widely known as a political gadfly. You’d think people would understand he’s more of a circus barker than a thoughtful politician.
In the 2000 presidential campaign, Trump briefly quit the Republican Party and flirted with the idea of running for president as a third party candidate. Then in 2004, 2008 and 2012, he hinted at a run for the White House but dropped out before entering any of those races.
JUST IGNORE HIM
Given this record of false starts, you’d think news organizations would ignore Trump and leave it to the supermarket tabloids to cover his political babble. But there he was on NBC’s Today show, a few days before he withdrew from the Empire State’s gubernatorial race, attacking President Obama for not being strong enough in his dealings with Russian President Vladimir Putin over his country’s occupation of Crimea. “Putin has eaten Obama’s lunch,” Trump said. Then he quickly added: “I just hope that Obama, who’s not looking too good, doesn’t do something very foolish and very stupid to show his manhood.”
A LOT OF DOUBLETALK
It’s just this kind of doublespeak that makes The Donald unelectable — that and his bad polling numbers. According to a recent Quinnipiac University poll, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat, has a hefty 63%-26% lead over Trump among the state’s registered voters.
But as in his other political false starts, Trumps claims he’d have been elected if he had stayed in the race. That’s the circus barker in him talking.
Trump blamed his decision to quit the governor’s race on the Republican Party’s failure to unify behind his candidacy. “The last thing you need is a primary,” he told a gathering of New York Republicans last month. In other words, Trump wanted a crowning, not an election, to propel him into a general election matchup against Cuomo. Republicans were smart not to do that.
Trump will never actually enter into a competitive race. His oversized ego won’t allow it. The prospect of losing is more than he can stand.
Trump is a perennial backbencher with a big set of lungs. His loud mouth gets him a lot of news media attention, as when he questioned Obama’s citizenship and demanded to see his college transcript. But you’ll never hear it in a political debate where the outcome of an election is at stake.
Sadly, given the news media’s infatuation with him, you can expect that Trump will cling to the political stage like those pesky stink bugs that just won’t go away.
DeWayne Wickham, dean of Morgan State University’s School of Global Journalism and Communication, writes on Tuesdays for USA TODAY.