The Truth About Donald Trump's New Campaign Strategy
He's no more qualified to be president now than he was a year ago.
BY CHARLES P. PIERCE
APR 22, 2016
Oh, come on. At least pretend that you know they're all clowning you. At least act like you're aware that it's all the biggest big con since Johnny Hooker signed on with the Gondorff mob.
Addressing about 100 committee members at the spring meeting here, many of them deeply skeptical about Mr. Trump's candidacy, the campaign chief, Paul Manafort, bluntly suggested the candidate's incendiary style amounted to an act.
"That's what's important for you to understand: That he gets it, and that the part he's been playing is evolving," Mr. Manafort said, suggesting that Mr. Trump was about to begin a more professional phase of his campaign.
"The negatives are going to come down, the image is going to change, but Clinton is still going to be crooked Hillary," he added. Mr. Manafort's comments, which included a PowerPoint presentation, came during a happy-hour reception at the beachside hotel resort here. They were made behind closed doors, which were guarded by security. But a person in attendance taped the speech and shared the recording with The New York Times.
The Republican Party is in the process of being played. They know it. The people in on the scam know it. The media know it. Now it's going to be time where everybody pretends that nobody understands what's really going on. If the con works, it becomes the truth. If enough people see Jesus in the bark of an oak tree, then he's really there.
He also openly said that Mr. Trump wanted to coordinate with the very forces he has spent much of his campaign attacking. "He gave us the mandate to bring together a team of professionals that could finish the job for him, but could also then begin to link in with the establishment institutions that are part of our party, what you represent, what the state parties represent," he said, also alluding to think tanks and members of Congress.
"We've started all those conversations," said Manafort, adding of Mr. Trump, "He cares about the united team." The remarks suggest Mr. Trump is conducting something of an inside-outside campaign simultaneously, railing against what he calls a "corrupt" process in public to win over anti-establishment Republicans while sending Mr. Manafort to assure party stalwarts of his true intentions.
It also suggests that He, Trump has looked over the putative establishment in what's left of the Republican Party and he's seen the biggest passel of marks and rubes he's seen in his entire career of seeking out marks and rubes, and it also suggests that he realizes he's already got their wallets half out of their pockets.
As for Mr. Trump's continual attacks on the nomination process, Mr. Manafort said he was largely focused on "transparency" and had no genuine desire to undermine the delegate-selection rules. "He is winning; he's not interested in changing the rules," he said.
Mr. Manafort acknowledged Mr. Trump's deep unpopularity — his "negatives," he called them — but invoked Ronald Reagan's initial polling deficit in 1980 to claim Mr. Trump's deficiencies were not permanent.
Mr. Reagan's unfavorability in 1980, however, was never as high as that of Mr. Trump now. "Fixing personality negatives is a lot easier than fixing character negatives," said Mr. Manafort, claiming that Hillary Clinton suffered from negative. "You can't change somebody's character. But you can change the way somebody presents themselves."
And that, Mr. Manafort said, was in the works.
It's not often, however, that the bunco artists shares this much with a fish he's already got hooked. Besides being a nearly perfect statement of political cynicism, what Manafort has given us in that statement is a look at the entire mechanism of the con he's already halfway to completing.
"You can't change somebody's character. But you can change the way somebody presents themselves."
Give Charlie Manson a suit and nice red tie and run him for alderman.
This is spectacular, beyond even Nixon's capacity for greasy, fraudulent self-invention.
Nixon at least pretended to be sincere. Manafort is telling us right up front that it's all a sham, and he's doing it because he knows the Republican Party has no choice but to sign onto the process of scamming itself.
And he knows that the elite political media is going to move heaven and earth to avoid pointing out the most important—and the most obvious—dynamic of the 2016 presidential campaign.
Let's face facts. He, Trump is no more qualified to be president today than he was a year ago. His rhetoric is still brainless and violent. His policy proposals barely qualify as either policies or proposals. Nothing is different except that this seems to be what the Republican primary electorate wants.
In response, Manafort has explained in clear and unequivocal language the basic rot in our democracy—in what has now become a quadrennial search for "authenticity" in our political leaders, it turns out that, in our politics of today, "authenticity" is the easiest thing to fake.
