From Stephen Hayes, at the Weekly Standard, "The Trump Goes On" (via
Memeorandum):
It’s not over. And it’s likely to end badly.
In an interview on CNN last night, Donald Trump suggested that Megyn Kelly’s tough questioning was inspired by her menstrual cycle. “You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes,” Trump told CNN's Don Lemon on Friday night. “Blood coming out of her—wherever.”
He refused to apologize, of course, but after widespread condemnation, Trump, who is running on candor and straight talk, sought to explain his comments in a Tweet. “Re Megyn Kelly quote: ‘you could see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever’ (NOSE). Just got on w/thought.’”
It’s a comment that might end any other presidential campaign. Trump is different, in part because this isn’t a campaign. It’s an extended media-driven ego ride.
From the beginning, he’s played by different rules because the media have let him. Trump works just blocks from the headquarters of the major broadcast and cable outlets. But as he’s rolled out his Trump for President brand, he has gotten journalists to come to him. He sits for interviews in the gilded atrium of Trump Towers, a nice home field advantage and one that sets him apart from the other politicians sitting in boring studios.
Trump has conducted frequent telephone interviews on cable networks, sometimes several times a day, and last weekend did “phoners” on two Sunday morning political shows. (Has any other candidate this cycle, in either party, been given an opportunity to do a television interview by phone?) If he were asked policy questions, the arrangement would give him an unfair advantage, with the opportunity to answer questions with a cheat sheet in front of him and Google at his fingertips. But substantive questions about the country and its problems are the exceptions in Trump’s conversations with journalists, who prefer to ask him about his latest controversial comment or seek to provoke the next one by asking him about his opponents. (Trump’s comments about Kelly didn’t provoke any follow-up questions from CNN host Don Lemon, whose interview with Trump continued for several more minutes). So the cycle continues: Trump says something outrageous that may or may not have any relevance to serving as president, he’s asked about it in a largely substance-free interview, and ratings climb—along with Trump’s name ID and poll ratings.
Trump is right, sadly, when he boasts that he is partly responsible for the 24 million viewers who tuned into the debate Thursday night. He has convinced himself that people watch because they love him and in a limited sense, he’s probably right about that, too. While I suspect that the Trump hype is driven by curiosity more than admiration, there is no doubt some segment of the population that is properly understood now as “Trump supporters.” That segment is small and will be shrinking in the coming weeks, but it won’t disappear.
The true Trump apologists are way too far in now. They've invested too much to bail on him. So his defenders will become increasingly desperate to convince people that this is all part of the establishment's failure to understand their anger and the media's failure to appreciate Trump’s appeal.
That’s backwards. It's not that the media haven’t failed to give Trump enough credit; we’ve given his supporters too much...
Keep reading.
The problem for Hayes is that he's clearly invested in a Republican victory in 2012. That's okay if you want to practice partisan journalism, and who doesn't nowadays? But from the perspective of the political system and democratic governance, it might not turn out bad at all.
Some folks seem to forget that the reason for the primaries is to foster robust competition between competing ideas. There's no law that says a candidate has to be an establishment politician. The horror for the GOP is that should Trump indeed run an independent presidential campaign, he'll no doubt siphon votes from the Republican ticket.
The ready comparison is to Ross Perot in 1992. The problem with that comparison is that Perot screwed up royally dropping out of the race during the Democrat Party convention, which was in June. Perot said the Dems had taken up all his positions and he was satisfied things like deficit reduction would be tackled within the party system. Big mistake. The astronomical grassroots anger at the beltway establishment was off the charts. The 1991 recession was grinding people down and defense downsizing was creating a nightmare for thousands upon thousands of people losing their jobs. Three-quarters of Americans thought the country was on the wrong track.
Perot ended up taking over 19 percent of the vote in November after he'd reentered the race in September of that year and participated in the presidential debates. Had he not exited in June, thereby alienating untold numbers of supporters, who once jilted weren't going back, Perot could have easily doubled his vote totals and won the presidency with a plurality of the vote. As it is Bill Clinton only won 43 percent. Jigger some of the numbers around, reducing the Democrat and Republican share of the electorate, and boom! Hey, stranger things have happened in American politics.
Sure, it's a long-shot scenario, and the concatenation of circumstances that propelled Perot that year might be completely irrelevant to what's happening today. What's not in doubt is that Trump is tapping into some kind of huge groundswell of discontent, especially on the immigration issue. Normally rock-ribbed conservatives are mounting vociferous defenses of Trump because they feel he's genuinely fighting for the issues they believe in. What's more, this purported incestuous relationship Trump has with the media only helps air those issues conservatives care about, propelling debates about illegal immigration, for example, to substantive levels not seen for years, if not decades. That's a good thing for American politics. Trump is right when he says the media types wouldn't even be talking about securing the border if it wasn't for him.
So what's really likely to happen? Well, for one thing we're going to have an extremely interesting campaign. And it's going to be a much more substantive campaign with Trump's presence, despite the attacks on the casino mogul as ill-informed and out only for himself. If the public starts getting bored with him we'll know soon enough. Lord knows there's no shortage of public opinion polls. And that's also good. We'll see Trump's popularly fade and other candidates will rise to the top. But those candidates will ignore the issues Trump's championed at their peril. I seriously doubt a pro-amnesty candidate will have much of a chance by the time Iowa and New Hampshire come around. And of course more and more voters will start to coalesce around a candidate that looks to combine conservative bona fides with the best chance of defeating Hillary Clinton. But it's going to be a sad day in conservative America if primary voters cluster around the mean of some Mitt Romney-esque candidate, because we've been down the "electabilty" road before. What we need is a movement candidate. We need another Reagan. We need to get someone who fosters the passions of the people and exudes America's exceptionalism. People will to rally to someone who looks most likely to restore America's promise, and America's standing in the world.
Who will it be? Scott Walker and Ted Cruz come to mind, but we'll see. Maybe Marco Rubio. He's learned his lesson on the Gang of Eight. Maybe Mike Huckabee. Maybe John Kasich. Maybe Carly Fiorina will somehow continue her phenomenal rise and do well in the 2016 primaries.
Either way, the system will work its will, and Donald Trump will either generate enough popular support to have a shot at the presidency, or he'll fall by the wayside. All the gnashing and thrashing we're seeing now demonstrates just how important Trump's moment is to American politics. Yes, Trump's different. He's also extremely consequential. Let's see how it plays out. It should be up to the voters to decide if he's not up to speed.
