The rise of Donald Trump – a cartoonish old-time carnival huckster in the guise of a 1980s New York real estate tycoon – will fascinate historians if he loses in November. But then if he wins power and brings his usual sensitivity to bear, this time on the international stage, there might not be any historians left, or any of us left. Nonetheless, it would be a mistake to get so locked into anti-Trumpism and the fear of a Trump presidency that one loses the capacity to process new information or acknowledge uncomfortable truths.
And there is no way round it. After shaking up his team, Trump has just done something interesting that might work. Until this week he has refused all demands from the Republican party Establishment that he “pivot”, which is code for “stop saying crazy things and leading the party off a cliff.” In a speech on Thursday evening in North Carolina he pivoted, rather successfully.
Ironically, the following day, today, he fired his campaign chairman Paul Manafort who had been unsuccessfully attempting to turn Trump into a more conventional candidate. Manafort was facing questions over his financial ties to the former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, in a plot that would have been dismissed by the producers of House of Cards as lacking credibility. In the mind-boggling saga that is the Trump presidential bid everything feels made for TV.
Predictably, the resignation has caused a media storm. It proves that the Trump campaign is cracking up, apparently, because his reputation such as it is rests on his ability to run a professional operation as an executive. I wonder whether it is true, or just more evidence of the media talking to itself in an outmoded fashion.
I love a good campaign meltdown and strategist resignation as much as the next political hack but, on both sides of the Atlantic internal games often make no difference to voters who are well-used to public figures and aides resigning and falling apart. These are voters who hate the media and decline to get offended on cue from journalists.
That being so, the end of Manafort is even less likely to agitate voters attracted by Trump. They like Trump partly because he defies all that conventional and received wisdom about what is death to a campaign. He breaks the rules. As James Carville, the strategic brains behind Bill Clinton’s win in 1992, put it this week: many people who are paid to advise politicians are terrified. If Trump wins by breaking all the rules then their conventional expertise is redundant.
Of course, Trump must do much more than appeal to those who are attracted to his reckless rhetoric and boastful antics. His failure to realise this – to accept that politics is hard and at this level he really does not know what he is doing – has helped give Hillary Clinton a poll lead. National polls in the last week gave her leads of between 2 and 6 points. She is winning.
In that regard, it is the speech that Trump gave on Thursday evening that is potentially much more significant than the row over his campaign chairman. It was an audacious, shameless, clever attempt to reposition and rescue his campaign.
First, Trump admitted mistakes, which is a lifetime first:
“I am not a politician. I have worked in business, creating jobs and rebuilding neighborhoods my entire adult life. I’ve never wanted to learn the language of the insiders, and I’ve never been politically correct – it takes far too much time, and can often make more difficult. Sometimes, in the heat of debate and speaking on a multitude of issues, you don’t choose the right words or you say the wrong thing. I have done that, and I regret it, particularly where it may have caused personal pain. Too much is at stake for us to be consumed with these issues. But one thing I can promise you is this: I will always tell you the truth.”
Stop laughing at the back at the bit about him always telling the truth. The point is not whether you buy the rebranded Trump, what matters to his new team is whether it appeals to voters who are unhappy with the direction in which America is going (65.1% of voters think America is on the wrong track and 28.4% the right track, according to the RealClear Politics average of polls). Will they find in his cleverly crafted promise to speak for the outsiders and forgotten people an opportunity to look at him again if he maintains this change of approach? Reading a speech and using a teleprompter he sounded like a different candidate:
“When I look at the failing schools, the terrible trade deals, and the infrastructure crumbling in our inner cities, I know all of this can be fixed – and it can be fixed very quickly. In the world I come from, if something is broken, you fix it. If something isn’t working, you replace it. If a product doesn’t deliver, you make a change. I have no patience for injustice, no tolerance for government incompetence, no sympathy for leaders who fail their citizens. That’s why I am running: to end the decades of bitter failure and to offer the American people a new future of honesty, justice and opportunity. A future where America, and its people, always – and I mean always – come first.”
Last week I claimed that we are witnessing the collapse of the post-1980s settlement, the globalised Clintonite orthodoxy on trade and diplomacy.The many of us who don’t want the world to blow up are lucky, I said, that the person riding the populist anti-elite wave is the poltroon Donald Trump. Such is the climate right now that any competent Republican would win November’s election chanting a mantra of change and then do heaven knows what in office. Trump, with 80 days still remaining in the campaign, is having a go at becoming that candidate.
If you find the reboot bogus then the chances are you were never going want a Trump win in the first place. You’re not really in his new target audience. He’s aiming at others in the US who are deeply distrustful of Hillary and bored and resentful, but to date put off by Trump’s idiotic meanderings. He offers a conscious plot switch, a scriptwriter’s device in which the audience is invited to think: that’s interesting, he’s trying something new and a lot of the media still hates him for it, let’s listen.
With Hillary such a weak candidate it would be a mistake to think Trump 2.0 will definitely not work.
Have a good weekend.
