slate.com
Well, it’s been 10 days, time for the grieving process to end. 10 days ago, Donald Trump crushed his opponents in the primary vote in Indiana and within 24 hours his two remaining opponents suspended their campaigns, essentially crowning the billionaire businessman as the presumptive presidential nominee of the Republican party.
What Trump accomplished is truly remarkable. Without a traditional campaign organization, without any active fundraising and without spending much of his own wealth at all, Trump vanquished a deep and talented field that included 9 current or former governors and 5 current or former senators. He did it simply by being Donald: he was brash, controversial, politically incorrect and (most importantly) uncannily in tune with what the voters wanted. It didn’t hurt that he was fascinating on a day to day basis, earning him billions of dollars of free media, leaving his competitors at an enormous disadvantage. Dozens of books will be written about the unique 2016 campaign.
The question that I and many other Republicans (elected or otherwise) have been wrestling with for the last ten days is whether to get behind and support the party’s nominee. Whether it’s current House Speaker Paul Ryan or millions of others, this is not an easy thing to do. I was initially intrigued (albeit cautiously so) about the prospect of a charismatic and successful businessman leading the nation. He wasn’t my first (or even my seventh) choice, to be sure, but if you had asked me to pick last summer between Trump and Ted Cruz I would have gone with Trump without hesitation because I felt he had a higher upside while Cruz’ no compromises mantra was a formula for more gridlock. I found Trump’s politically incorrect approach to be sleazily seductive and caught myself nodding in agreement at some of his pronouncements. I thought to myself, does this man have the successful businessman appeal of Mitt Romney but with the charisma and cutthroat political skill that Romney lacked?
Well, Trump ran a scorched earth campaign, denigrating and insulting anybody who didn’t get on his bandwagon. He made preposterous policy proposals and constantly flip-flopped on others, sometimes within the same sentence. The more I saw of Trump, the more I soured on him (and if you’re a political junkie like myself, you couldn’t help but see him a LOT). What bothered (and still bothers) me the most was not the crazy ideas or the childish behavior but the fact that he didn’t seem to be growing and learning. Eventually, even though I was an enthusiastic John Kasich supporter from the beginning, I was ready to vote for Cruz in California’s June 7th primary simply because he was clearly the people’s 2nd choice and I was firmly in the “Stop Trump” camp, hoping for Cruz to prevail at a contested convention.
I felt from the beginning that this was a bucket list item for Trump (run for president); he clearly had not done the work to fully educate himself on the nuances of all the issues a president must face. The problem now is that, every time I see an interview with Trump, I don’t see any evidence that he’s been expanding his knowledge base. He still says stunningly dumb and naive things. Exhibit A: he recently said we could “print money” to help pay down the national debt. Well, OK, we all learned in Econ 101 that when a country simply prints money, that leads to harmful inflation. And this is a master businessman?
So the voters of America, we are now faced with the choice of Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump. For me any tens of millions of others, that’s choosing to chop off my right arm or my left arm. I live on the Pacific Ocean in Redondo Beach. This is like a choice of moving to Bismarck, North Dakota or Bemidji, Minnesota. If the five stages of grief are denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance, I have accepted this reality but am still depressed.
I’ve been in the “Never Hillary” camp for a long time and there is no way I would ever support her. I won’t go through all the reasons here but they’re the same as most who are not fans of Secretary Clinton. As for the Donald, I’m not “Never Trump” but I’m really close. Right now, I cannot imagine voting for this man who has appeared both un-serious about being and ill-prepared to be President of the United States.
So what could Donald Trump do between now and Election Day on November 8 to make the sale to me and millions of other depressed Republicans that we should vote for him for president and not spend the day at home watching re-runs of House of Cards? I’m going to be blunt. It’s a heavy lift and I’m going to be a really tough sell but I’ll lay it out. What does he need to do?
- Pick a terrific running mate to be his Vice-President. I want to see somebody with a lot of experience and gravitas. In particular, I want to see a VP who will not be a “yes” man. I want a VP who won’t be afraid to tell Trump he’s nuts when he’s nuts. If Trump convinces John Kasich to be his VP, that would be a “sale” I could respect. It would be a slightly political pick (to help win Ohio) but it would also demonstrate that he was able to win over a fierce critic. If not Kasich, I’d want to see somebody like Newt Gingrich or former Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge (also a former governor of Pennsylvania). I guess New Jersey Governor Chris Christie would fill this bill too but, since he was the first major politician on the Trump train, it means Trump couldn’t reach out to a critic to find someone better. I don’t want to see a pandering political pick like New Mexico Governor Susana Martinez or South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley. Many pundits and strategists have said he needs to “balance the ticket” with a woman or a minority. Well, that would be great but I can’t think of any Republican woman right now who fits this bill. He can’t pick Carly Fiorina because there’s too much bad blood. Condoleeza Rice has the national security credentials to balance the ticket but she’s linked to Bush and the Iran war and one of Trump’s hammers against Hillary is her support for the war. Trump likes to paint detractors of his as “lightweights.” Bluntly, Trump needs a “heavyweight,” another tough guy, somebody who won’t hesitate to punch him in the face, figuratively or literally.
- Display a greater knowledge of policy than he has thus far. This is an intelligent man and he’s been thinking about running for president for a long time. Mark Halperin (from the excellent Bloomberg Politics show With All Due Respect) made an interesting point on his show yesterday that he had an off-camera discussion with Trump about NATO and that Trump seemed to actually be VERY well versed in the nuances of the U.S. relationship with that organization. I need to see more examples that he actually has a clue. The debates against Clinton (assuming she’s the nominee) will be critical. Can he go one-on-one with an experienced and highly knowledgeable opponent without looking like a fool?
- Win over the majority of Republican lawmakers. He doesn’t have to convince all “Never Trump” folks like Mitt Romney and Jeb Bush but getting most of Congress and the Senate on his side will, by definition, validate the rationale for his presidency. This is the king deal-maker, right? The challenge, of course, will be to accomplish this without upsetting his base of support that loves him because he’s anti-Washington. He has to simultaneously make the sale within the party he’s leading, with his voters who hate the party and with skeptics like me.
- Stop Tweeting. He can attack Hillary Clinton all he wants but he needs to lay off almost everyone else. Not every GOP lawmaker will be on board with him so if another Republican says something critical, don’t reflexively call them a loser. Be nice. He’s said many times he can be “more presidential.” Now that he’s in the finals, it’s time to prove it. Show discipline. Trump makes a point that he doesn’t drink or smoke but he has another addiction that must be cured!
- Show his tax returns. Trump is going to be pounded relentlessly for not releasing his tax returns and his excuse that he can’t release them while under audit rings hollow. Romney had to have his arm twisted to release his because he was frankly embarrassed about how low his effective tax rate was (due to his income coming from capital gains). Trump has bragged about how he pays as little in taxes as possible and that maybe he should pay more, so that’s probably not the problem. I can only speculate of course but my guess is that his reluctance is for one of three reasons. First, his year to year income is not as robust as one would expect from a man who claims to be worth $10 billion. The tax returns may show that a significant majority of his income has been coming from his role as the host of The Celebrity Apprentice and not from being a brilliant businessman. Second, the tax returns may show that he gives very little money to charity, in particular charities related to military veterans’ groups, which would be a particular embarrassment because of his frequent proclamations about much he “loves the vets.” Finally, despite his bragging about paying as little as possible, if his returns would show that he barely pays any tax at all, that would be a problem and would play right into the Clinton/Obama “fair share” argument.
I’ll admit, one of the things that amuses me about the angst that so many Republicans have about the Trump nomination is that he doesn’t espouse conservative principles. He supports Planned Parenthood, he’s talking about raising the minimum wage, he doesn’t want to touch entitlements, etc. That seems to me to be the minor point. The angst that I have about Trump is that he’s behaved like a jackass and he doesn’t seem to know much more about anything than I do. I really don’t know what his policy views are (other than wanting to deport 11 million illegals and ban all Muslims from the U.S.).
Let me sum up Trump’s political philosophy the way I see it, with two new slogans you can put on a baseball cap: “America First” and “Let’s Make a Deal.” When you boil it down to those simple phrases, I honestly kind of like it. We have had 8 years of gridlock between a partisan president and a partisan Republican Congress. If the next president isn’t going to get hung up on ideology, that’s an asset. This is the upside of Trump. The downside is that he gets us into a nuclear war and we’re all vaporized into a mushroom cloud.
Let me finish with this: I am here painting a best-case scenario for the possibility of supporting Donald Trump. I am not even close to being there yet. Not remotely close. One argument I’ve started to hear from Trump backers goes something like this: “I didn’t like John McCain in 2008 or Mitt Romney in 2012 but I supported and voted for them because they were the party’s nominees and a better choice than Barack Obama. The Republican voters have spoken. It’s time to rally behind the people’s choice of our party. Not voting at all is a vote for Hillary Clinton.”
I want to focus on the last line, “not voting at all is a vote for Hillary Clinton.” This is also the argument used against the talk about a third-party candidate (not likely to happen) or a vote for the Libertarian party candidate (likely fiscally conservative and socially liberal former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson). I’m going to be emphatic about this: it’s not my fault (or the fault of the 60% of the voters who voted against him) that the choice is between Trump and Clinton. In every single exit poll, the networks asked what the most important “candidate quality” was: the choices were….
- Can Bring Change (Trump dominated with these voters)
- Tells it Like it Is (Trump dominated here too, even though he often does NOT tell it like it is)
- Shares My Values (this was in the Ted Cruz wheelhouse)
- Can Win in November (Marco Rubio usually topped with these voters, then Kasich when Rubio dropped out)
The last of those four candidate qualities (“can win in November”) was typically only the most important for about just 10% of the voters. This means that 90% of all the primary voters cared about something else more than winning, which seems fairly critical to me, but maybe I’m crazy.
If you’re a Republican and if you really wanted to win in November, you should have voted for Rubio or Kasich. Dozens of polls showed Rubio and Kasich beating Hillary; those same polls showed Trump losing and Cruz in a toss-up. If there’s one thing we’ve learned about Trump’s thumping of the GOP, it’s this: the polls are usually right.
I’m not saying that Trump can’t move the numbers and beat Hillary in the fall. She is a deeply flawed candidate and, assuming she’s not indicted, is still likely to have to contend with a continual news trip about her private email server and the Clinton Foundation. This will be an election of the two most disliked candidates in presidential history but Trump has a legion of highly motivated and dedicated supporters which Clinton does not.
But, let me be abundantly clear, if Trump does not evolve, if he continues to behave like a clown, if he gets schooled in the debates and if that means that millions of Republicans stay home and Hillary ascends to the Oval Office, it will not the fault of the Republicans who didn’t vote for him. It will be the fault of the voters who did vote for him during the primary season despite all the warning signs that he could not be elected in November. This is not the same as voters staying home in 2012 for silly reasons like Romney’s Mormon faith or that he once introduced health care reform in Massachusetts. If voters stay home in 2016 it’s because the party’s nominee has not proven to be worthy or qualified for the office he seeks.
Thanks for reading!!
Chris Bodig