At the Los Angeles Times, "Analysis: Donald Trump's campaign: It's less chaotic and more calculated than it looks":
Louise Sunshine, a former New York lobbyist and real estate executive, has known Donald Trump for more than 40 years. She shared a small office with Trump just as his career as a developer began to take off. She helped him cajole politicians for tax breaks on his first buildings.Still more.
Knowing how Trump operates, Sunshine was surprised to hear his rival Jeb Bush brand him last week as a “chaos candidate.” Trump, she said, “is the least chaotic person I know.”
“The least,” she added to underline the point. “And the most determined person I know.”
Trump’s raw, in-your-face style of politics can come off as random ranting. Over the weekend, he called Hillary Clinton a liar and Bush a loser.
“Dumb as a rock!” he wrote on Twitter of the former Florida governor.
But if Trump sows chaos, it is tightly controlled chaos. The bluster and put-downs are part of a meticulously calculated strategy by a surprisingly disciplined front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination. Trump is the rare first-time candidate whose mastery of basic political skills seems unmatched by most, if not all, of his rivals in a crowded Republican field.
Trump’s history as a builder of major Manhattan real estate projects schooled him in the real-world give-and-take of politics at a level where enormous amounts of money and power are at stake. For New York developers whose business model depends on taxpayer subsidies, a keen understanding of how governors and mayors operate can make or break a real estate empire.
Trump’s father, Fred Trump, was a major New York City developer with deep ties to elected officials. In the 1970s, Donald Trump began forging his own ties with politicians — among them Mayor Ed Koch and Gov. Hugh Carey — as he sought tax breaks on midtown high-rise projects with a higher profile than anything his father had built.
Bill Cunningham, a veteran New York political operative, said the city’s big developers must weather bad press, but stay focused on their goals as they battle unions, contractors, public agencies, environmental groups and property owners who refuse to sell their land.
“You learn to take a lot of hits and keep on going, and that’s Donald Trump,” Cunningham said.
Trump, 69, jokes that he hates being a politician after six months in the trade. He also boasts of using no teleprompter, giving crowds the impression that his remarks, sometimes salted with profanity, are spontaneous.
“I speak for an hour and a half with no notes, no nothing,” he told a recent rally of supporters in Las Vegas.
But in city after city, Trump hews closely to his stump speech, staying on message as faithfully as the best of career politicians. The words vary, but the themes stay the same — all in service of solidifying and expanding his core audience of blue-collar white men...
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