By Daniel Greenfield
As the long slow race to beat Hillary drags on, there will be a thousand conservative stories and blog posts demonstrating beyond a shadow of a doubt that Donald Trump is a hypocrite, that he supported illegal immigrants, Hillary, abortion and higher taxes. And few of them will leave our small bubble.
Trump may indeed be a liar and a hypocrite, though he wouldn’t be the only candidate in the race who has moved to the right or abandoned previous positions, but he understands what the others don’t.
The Republican field is a mass of highly qualified and talented people with poor media skills and worse communication skills. Some consciously choose to play it safe. Others seem to have no clue how to win a debate or a drive a message home.
Donald Trump has been a joke of one kind or another for most of his adult life, and until now he’s been an incredibly successful joke. He is burning the empire that allowed him to enjoy a highly privileged lifestyle by marketing his brand as a blatant luxury item that anyone could have.
Trump made wealth populist. He made a seeming upper class lifestyle appear accessible in all its ridiculously tacky glory. He might be betting that he can get it all back once the furor dies down and his run becomes another chapter that keeps him in public view. But he’s betting a lot as the corporations that enabled him to play billionaire are cutting their ties with him.
And without those companies marketing his brand, he’s a moderately wealthy man with a lot of debts and a troubled business plan.
So Trump is taking a huge gamble. Whatever he believes, he appears to be betting that he can become president. Unlike some other candidates, this doesn’t come down to speaking fees. If no company will touch his brand, being able to charge a few thousand more per speech won’t make up for his losses.
Like the Confederate flag, the more he comes under fire, the more conservatives rally around him. It’s a perverse dynamic that the media feeds on. The media would love to see Trump in the race long enough to make it come down to him and Jeb Bush. They might regret that, but they probably won’t.
Conservative punditry is mourning a field in which talented and promising Republican leaders are being ground under. And they have a point, but if those Republicans were really so talented and promising they wouldn’t be falling behind to a man whose big talent is brash self-confidence.
Brash self-confidence, an out-sized personality, a willingness to take great personal risks are what is absent from the Republican field. And those define Trump’s brand. They may be fake, but in an age where the camera defines truth, your messaging is only as good as your acting and your sales skills.
Donald Trump is a great salesman. His Republican rivals aren’t. Some are talented lawyers. They understand policy and political tactics. But they couldn’t sell a discounted heater to Eskimos.
His entry into the race may be an important wake up call.
If the genuine conservatives can’t outsell Trump, they’re not going to be able to outsell bland corporate brands like Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton. It won’t matter who is left standing because no one will be left standing.
Like most great salesmen, Donald Trump is an instinctive populist. He knows how to get people’s attention and how to promise them a better life. Those are also the skills of a good politician.
And like most salesmen, plenty of people hate him instinctively. Others are willing to believe in him all the way.
Trump has changed the race from a huddle of politicians trying to lock down distinct blocs and lines of appeal in the party, Evangelicals, libertarians, candidates who can appeal to minorities, youth votes, to blatant populism. Trump doesn’t appeal to any blocs. He has the FOX News sensibility of shouting the right sorts of things at the right time with a fake working class edge.
In short, he’s Bill O’Reilly.
The more he does it, the more he’s identified with genuine conservatism. The liberal backlash feeds into his image because he’s doing what none of the candidates seem to consistently do, which is fight.
Like Bill O’Reilly, Donald Trump is probably fake. But it doesn’t really matter. Politics is itself fake. Trump’s entry moves it from a race about blocs to a race about issues. It shows the other candidates what they aren’t doing.
The gifted populist knows how to echo the anger of the people, to speak for those who feel unrepresented, to offer the common sense responses that most people think they would offer in his place. That is what some of the candidates have tried to do, it’s what Trump is actually doing.
The Republican field is filled with candidates who offer work-shopped solutions. Even the best of them don’t quite channel the public outrage, the sense of persecution that so many people feel.
They’re sensible, reasonably personable, somewhat articulate, possessed of a measured sense of humor and all those things that Mitt Romney couldn’t figure out how to be in front of a camera.
By 2012 standards, they’re a vast improvement. By 2016 standards, that may not be enough.
A lot of people are going to embrace Trump because he says what they’re thinking and feeling. They’re going to nod along to Ted Cruz or Scott Walker without feeling engaged in the same way.
That’s just human nature.
Trump is a wake-up call that conservative candidates need to take it to the next level. That doesn’t mean moving to the “right” of Trump. If Trump is willing to say anything, there may be no such place. It means connecting with people at a deeper level than just the rhetoric. It means doing more than retelling their own compelling personal stories.
People need someone to fight for them. They need more from a politician than a great story. They need the feeling that the politician will do everything he can to fight for their way of life.
If they want to win, they are going to have to silence their inner lawyer, shut down some of the skills they learned as politicians, and learn to project what their audience is feeling. A good politician knows what you want to hear. A good salesman knows what you want to feel.
Trump isn’t fighting this as a battle of ideas or policies. He’s talking about what people feel.
Trump has risen in the polls because the GOP has relentlessly betrayed its voters and he is the one who is saying that.
I’m a Daniel Greenfield fan but not of this particular piece.
Few seem to be accepting at face value what Trump is saying about his candidacy . And that is, he got into the race because he sees America declining rapidly and he loves the country and wants to help save it. We all want to save it but few of us are in a position to do so. Trump may well be.
Having changed positions over the years does not make him a bad candidate. Times are different and the US is now at a critical state. He is on the right side of history for saving the nation after Obama’s follies, if only it isn’t too late.
Trump has been entirely consistent for several years now about Obama and what the democrats are doing to America. He offered $5 million for Obama to release his birth certificate which he eventually did, mostly because of Trumps insistence. And regardless of what most people think, there is still a lot of doubt about the authenticity of that certificate by several experts who have studied it, which is not to say Obama was born outside the US, just that the paper itself may be phony.
I say thank you to Donald Trump. Whether is Presidential material only time will tell, but in any case he has brought to the fore the idea that one who has political aspirations can speak boldly and without self censoring. Haven’t we had enough of that miserable politically correct style by so many politicians?
Trump will force other Republicans to step it up a notch to compete, and that’s a good thing. We don’t need a Republican president, we need a conservative president with ideals reflecting true conservative ideas. Trump is a great step in that direction.
Mr. Greenfield is a truly great writer, one of my favourites. But I hardly recognized this column. It has none of his characteristic cleverness, humour or irony. Everyone’s allowed a dud now and then and for me, this column was a real dud.
Greenfield will say anything to make the republicans look bad. Trump is not going to win the nomination and neither is Jeb Bush. As for his claim that Hillary Clinton knows how to sell herself, that’s a new one. She couldn’t sell a discounted heater to the Eskimos. She is where she is because her last name is Clinton, because she is a woman, and because she loves moslems as much as Obama does.
Daniel Greenfield spoils an otherwise interesting piece with charges that O’Reilly and Trump are “probably fake”. Like much of the arrogant punditry he apparently believes he has mind-reading abilities not vouchsafed to ordinary mortals.
As usual, another great Greenfield article. I’m afraid of what he says is the GOP field. Lots of talented people, I could vote for almost any of them, but I worry about the Democrat’s blue state firewall which might be too much to overcome.Can you imagine losing to Hillary?