Carl Hulse has an article in the New York Times that will have a lot of people rolling their eyes, particularly the supporters of Donald Trump. The piece is about Trump’s lack of relationships with the Republican Establishment in Washington DC. And, while Hulse acknowledges that this is almost the point of Trump’s appeal, the main idea is that it is a real liability for him now that he needs to unite the party. It would also make it quite a challenge to assemble a cabinet and to actually govern once in office.
There was one aspect of Hulse’s article that caught me eye. It came in a section that noted that Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee has never even met Trump and has no idea what to make of him.
The practitioners of politics at such rarefied heights are usually part of a relatively small universe: governors, senators, House members, cabinet secretaries, top elected state officials, operatives, advisers and big-money donors, among others. They tend to know or at least know of one another from years of rubbing shoulders at national and state conventions, myriad political dinners, campaigns, National Governors Association meetings, or wheeling and dealing in Congress. Even Ross Perot, who ran an independent campaign for president in 1992 with no elective experience, had broad dealings with the federal government over several decades.
As Mr. Alexander put it, “I have been to a lot of things over 40 years.”
That experience and track record provide those in the political world a working knowledge of whether candidates are true to their word, are willing to compromise, know the subject matter, can keep a confidence — all among the important things to weigh in making political judgments.
Two parts of that are worth considering. Does Donald Trump keep his word and can he keep a confidence?
Go back to last July, and remember when Trump got angry with Senator Lindsey Graham and gave out his phone number to the public.
Speaking in front of hundreds at a rally in South Carolina on Tuesday, Donald Trump read a number he said people could use to reach South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham’s private cell phone.
Trump and Graham have engaged in an ongoing feud in the past few days as they battle for the Republican presidential nomination. In Trump’s speech Tuesday, he called Graham an “idiot,” after Graham called him a “jackass,” in an interview Monday with CNN’s Kate Bolduan.
Senator Graham tried to make the best of it.
Probably getting a new phone. iPhone or Android?
— Lindsey Graham (@LindseyGrahamSC) July 21, 2015
What made the incident damaging for Graham wasn’t so much the inconvenience of having to get a new phone. It was Trump’s explanation for why he had Graham’s phone number in the first place.
Trump said Graham gave him the number a few years ago when he called to ask for a campaign donation and a “good reference” at Fox News, where Trump is a frequent guest. He then held up a yellow piece of paper with a phone number with the Washington, D.C., area code written on it.
“Give it a shot,” Trump said. “Your local politician, you know? He won’t fix anything but at least he’ll talk to you.”
That aggressive take-no-prisoners style on the campaign trail helped Trump demolish weaklings like Sen. Graham, but it also revealed that on a very basic level he cannot be trusted to keep a confidence. If you make yourself vulnerable to him, he will put it in the bank and keep it in reserve for a day when he can use it against you.
That makes it difficult to deal with him in a candid way or in any genuine sense of real partnership.
Now, whether he can keep his word is a related but somewhat different consideration.
The indications are that his word is only good for the length of a cable news segment interview. He may come back tomorrow and explain that he was just negotiating and that he likes to be unpredictable. He may say that he was only throwing some ideas out there and that nothing is fixed in stone.
What happens when Trump sits down with you, makes a commitment, and shakes your hand?
Does he honor that kind of agreement?
Why don’t you ask all the contractors he’s bilked out of money by using the bankruptcy courts or just by simply refusing to pay in full? Ask the New Jersey Casino Control Commission who sat there when he promised that he would never use junk bonds to finance his Atlantic City deals.
Donald Trump is one of the most litigious people in the country both because he uses the courts to help him break his word and because other people have to resort to the courts to make him keep his word. And let’s not forget that he also gets hauled into court for outright fraud. If he’s elected, he’ll be the first president-elect to go on trial for fraud before he can even be sworn in.
U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel on Friday scheduled trial for Nov. 28 in the suit that alleges people who paid up to $35,000 for real estate seminars got defrauded. The likely Republican nominee planned to attend most, if not all, of the trial and would testify, Trump attorney Daniel Petrocelli said…
…The lawsuit is one of three that accuse Trump University of fleecing students with unfulfilled promises to teach secrets of success in real estate.
The San Diego suit says Trump University, which no longer operates and was not accredited as a school, gave seminars and classes across the country that were like infomercials, constantly pressuring students to buy more and, in the end, failing to deliver.
A San Diego judge named Gonzalo Curiel sounds like a guy Trump and his supporters would like to deport. That could add a little extra tension to the courtroom, don’t you think?
In any case, it’s not a perception problem for Trump that he doesn’t have good, trusting relationships with other Republicans. But it’s still going to hurt his campaign. People who don’t agree with you might go to work for you anyway, but probably not if they don’t feel you can be trusted on any level.
Trump’s a charlatan, which most folks from New York and New Jersey have known for decades. Trust me, getting to know him better isn’t going to put anyone’s mind at ease.
The media will do its best to make this seem like a close race. Trump’s getting his post-primary-consolidation bounce. Rank-and-file Republicans are rallying to him. But the guy is flawed in so many ways it’s hard to imagine his campaign operating in a professional or efficient manner. It’s not impossible that he could win, and we need to work hard to make sure it doesn’t happen, but I’ve never seen a candidate enter a presidential election looking weaker than Trump. Of course McGovern and Goldwater were before my time. I remember Mondale. He’s the weakest I can recall until now.
Mondale and Dole had a different kind of weakness, which was mainly a lack of enthusiasm.
Very true. My comment wasn’t directly on point to your article; I’d wandered off in my own direction. Those guys were both long-term insiders.
Again, going off on a tangent, Dole got slaughtered by Clinton but I don’t think of him as weak like Mondale. Both were up against incumbents, which is obviously a tough spot, and both got spanked hard. But Mondale would have gotten his clock cleaned one-on-one against Dole in my opinion. Dole was this guy who, ironically — though funny, charming and even disarming — had a way of coming across as curt and harsh on the campaign trail. It was hard to forget his VP performance. But Mondale just oozed old-time-political-machine-Democrat.
It was the slow decades-long accretion of dislike and distrust for that sort of politician that cost us the House in “94. We lost more than 50 seats that cycle. Of course NAFTA, the assault weapons ban and Clinton’s run at health care reform all created headwinds. A bunch of stuff came together that year. But it was an underlying weakness in the party and distrust of Democratic politics among progressives, together with the tectonic shifting of party loyalty from Democrats to Republicans across the South, that opened the door to such devastation. Clinton was playing a middle-game which left down ticket races vulnerable from the left and the right. Twenty two years later, the party still hasn’t recovered.
Also, you know what I think of Reagan, but his 1984 campaign was magnificent.
I also think people discount how much good will Reagan ironically gained by getting shot and then dealing with it with such grace.
Voting against the guy that got shot and almost died?
I wouldn’t put it all on Mondale. He was the wrong guy at the wrong time, facing all the forces you mentioned, plus the ones I just mentioned.
It was the Zenith of the conservative backlash, although it still had plenty of strength. About 30 years worth, as it turned out.
Those are great points. The Zenith of conservative strength for sure. Reagan could have chosen to be the guy conservative think he was, with huge spending cuts. But he chose instead to maximize his popularity with the entire country rather than just his own base.
Sounds like that particular Trump lawyer doesn’t even believe Trump will become President if he says that Trump plans on attending the trial starting Nov 28. Most president elects have a full schedule already.
I doubt he or Trump are even thinking about the election consequences as related to the fraud trial.
Trump and his people obviously just go full bore no restraint at all times.
Whether Trump is planning to be at the trial or not probably doesn’t even enter the equation at this point. The lawyer is just taking the maximalist position to convey that Trump will pull out all the stops and he’s not backing down.
I wouldn’t expect anything else from these jokers at this point.
All the themes that unify the Trump analyses are pretty clear:
and especially any establishment politicians in both parties.
So if Trump is a two faced backstabber? The Republican primary voters are counting on it.
You forgot the two most important categories of people that GOP voters want their candidate to stick the shiv in:
They hate all the others, but IMO the first two, above, incite a hatred with the passion of a 1000 white hot suns.
Actually, I haven’t heard anything anti-gay from him. Or anti-minority. Not saying he hasn’t said them, just that they haven’t been reported to me by the media.
And I only heard opposition to illegal immigration. I know most Democrats think that doesn’t exist because we still have an Open Door policy, but the law is the law and the presence of illegals makes them easy to blackmail into working below minimum wage and undercuts other worker safeguards. It would be better if we did have an open door. That would end the exploitation. It would be best to have a sustainable immigration quota coupled with vigorous enforcement, but that can’t happen when states like California and Illinois operate their own immigration policy. Perhaps the state legislatures should be arrested as co-conspirators.
He called Mexicans rapists.
The entire birther thing against POTUS was nothing but racism.
There is a reason why all these recognized WHITE POWER/WHITE NATIONALIST/KKK folks are OPENLY supporting him.
They know what they hear.
Maybe, you choose not to.
How is Trump any different from any other really rich person? He’s really not. The debates are going to be so fun!!
Well you dont want chummy politicians.They just scratch their backs and we get fuck all. That saud because we have a shitty system we also need politicians that can at least work together enough to keep things moving. Tight line to walk some days.
Freudian slip? it certainly is Saud(i).
Hulse describes the social functions of an establishment that allow the public to tolerate them and create “normal times”.
Trust, candor, and often acutal public service (even if done as a matter of nobless oblige).
The entire US establishment has failed the public over the past, what, 48 years? 70 years? Certainly the past 22 years. It was driven by conservatives, but to the extent that others said “me too”, they are also complicit.
Trump is the consequence for the Republican Party, that has made what people believe more important than what actually is happening.
The inability of the Clinton supporters to understand the Sanders supporters is the consequence for the Democratic Party.
The basic message for both is the intense feeling and belief that the American public can no longer tolerate and establishment that is no longer committed to peace and prosperity.
As has be often mention Clinton promises incrementalism (but essentially more of the same), Trump promises himself and some vague “something yuuge”, and Sanders promises the “world turned upside down” as the means forward. There is no real policy discussion as exist when there is a functioning establishment.
We now know the consequences of “Nixon’s the One”, the “Reagan Revolution”, the “thousand points of light”, the “bridge to the 21st century”, the “humble foreign policy”. We know how the establishment of both parties dug in its heels after 2008 with a policy of “No, we can’t”. We know who both parties put targets on. It wasn’t Jamie Dimon or Dick Cheney or Lloyd Blankfein; Jeffrey Skilling must be pissed.
You are whistling past the graveyard and assuming that the public will treat the next six months as a routine election. The hardness of the right and the frustration of the left make that unlikely.
And this is not just the dynamics of politics in the US. It is the tone of politics in Europe, Australia, New Zealand — even Russia, China, and likely North Korea as well given Kim’s recent actions. The attempts of the US to regain its sole superpower status, the austerity solution to the global bank fraud meltdown, the denial of global climate change, the increase knowledge that the “great democracies” of US, Canada, Australia, UK, and New Zealand are engaged in unprecented surveillance of the world, and the global militarization of local law enforcement have been met with denial and then understanding the realities. Now the various publics of nations around the world are angry and expressing it through: direct action movements, generally from the left; more support for radical right-wing autocratic leaders; plodding on trying to ignore what is going on; knowledgeable apathy of being just drained; various forms of addiction, including to firearms.
Trump is just one of the shinier objects in this crisis. Without Trump, there would be some other media shiny object. Makes one long for the halcyon days when the shiny object was Gary Condit. (Likely because he was seen as the most defeatable Democrat in 2002).
I think you mean understating not understanding the realities
re:
You’re welcome.
But wait, today is Talk Like a Pirate Day??? I didn’t get the memo! Why wasn’t I informed of this?
<sincerely hopes a ‘just kidding’ is not necessary here>
*’fixed that for you’