One of the things that seems to have never sunk in for Donald Trump’s GOP rivals (or at least until they were either sitting back at home on the couch reflecting on why they were beaten so badly or else talking sheepishly to reporters on Capitol Hill about their plans to retire from politics after being trounced in their home state) is that he feeds off of controversy and publicity. The more you talk about him - good or bad - the larger he looms in voters’ minds.
Although certainly adept at whipping crowds into a frenzy and clearly a much more savvy politician than probably even he suspected going into the campaign, the Trump juggernaut is to some extent a monster of the GOP field’s own making. The more they focused on Trump, the more voters did too, and before you knew it, he was the frontrunner. At that point, it became self-fulfilling - they had to focus on him because he was at the top of the polls.
But alas, they never learned. He was best left alone from the start to fizzle out or, more likely, to self-destruct of his own accord. Instead, by creating an “us versus him” dynamic, the other Republicans made an anti-establishment candidate out of a billionaire who probably didn’t even know what “anti-establishment” meant when he entered the race. Before you knew it, Trump was Mr. Anti-Washington and from that point forward he could do no wrong.
So oblivious to this are Republicans that they’re about to make the very same mistake with the GOP convention. If you were to have gathered an arena full of Trump voters in January and asked them to raise their hands if they could explain what a “contested convention” was, our guess is that you would have come up with a stadium full of full pockets.
But that’s not the case now. The media, the Republicans, the Democrats, indeed damn near everyone is talking about what strategies the GOP can employ in Cleveland to steal the nomination away from Trump. Well guess what? Just like that, everyone has virtually guaranteed that they’ll never be able to get away with it.
No comments:
Post a Comment