Despite the previous Associated Press reports that Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton had already officially surpassed the minimum delegate thresholds needed to secure their party nominations, tonight it became official. As the final votes are tallied in California, New Jersey, Montana, New Mexico and the Dakotas, the two celebrity candidates have locked up the delegates they each needed to ensure that they will be our two major party candidates for President of the United States.
So, let me be the almost last person to congratulate the two winners. And for those of you, my friends, who are supporters of Trump and Clinton, I congratulate you on the win. Tonight, Trump delivered the kind of acceptance speech that would normally turn me (a lifelong Republican) into a supporter. Mostly reading off a teleprompter, he spelled out his “America first” agenda in a clear and concise way, intelligently making the case that the existing system cannot be fixed by the existing politicians. (At the time of the publishing of this post, Hillary Clinton has not yet spoken).
But despite a nice speech tonight, I can’t forget how Trump won it. I can’t forget that, in spite have already having the nomination sewn up, he felt compelled to create an unneeded controversy by attacking the heritage the judge in the class action Trump University case. So that’s about enough in the congratulations department.
This is a two part post. In Part I I’m going to remind or explain to us all how we got here and then in Part II propose solutions for a better nominating process in the future. If you can get past my transparent animus towards the nominees, I think you’ll find both the review and the proposal interesting on an intellectual level.
Now, when I ask how we got “here,” the place to which I’m referring is the place where the voters have selected two of the most unpopular candidates in the history of our democracy. No matter who wins, more than half of the nation’s population will despise and hold outright contempt for the next president from the moment they are elected. This is a sad state of affairs. How did it happen?
On the Republican side, it happened because the media fell in love with the ratings juggernaut known as Trump, delivering to the billionaire candidate about 2 billion dollars worth of free air time, breathlessly covering his rallies and validating the theory that all publicity is good publicity. Instead of a campaign about issues, it became a campaign about Tweets, insults, and penis size. Trump, to his credit, played the media and the politician-hating GOP electorate like a stradivarius. He said things nobody would say and, in a field with sixteen traditional candidates, was able to create his own political lane.
So while there was competition for the true conservative lane, the establishment lane, the moderate lane, the evangelical lane, and the libertarian lane, the Donald created the Trump lane in which he was the only choice. By calling for mass deportations, a ban on entry to the U.S. for a third of the world’s population and by boasting that he could get our southern neighbor to pay for a wall on the border, he secured the vote of the xenophobic, racist and fearful. But he also understood that the GOP had for decades paid lip service to the blue collar working class members of the party and he promised to bring their jobs back through trade policy and just by being Donald. And finally, after watching a dysfunctional government accomplish nothing for what feels like forever, he was able to win over enough intelligent Republican voters by promising to shake up the system as somebody, as a self-funded candidate, who would not be beholden to the billion dollar lobbying industry.
Trump vanquished his opponents with his boasts, lies, media manipulation and, most importantly, his understanding of the art of persuasion. I had what you might call an “ah-ha” moment when watching Real Time with Bill Maher a couple of weeks ago. Maher is an admitted liberal and socialist but, even if you’re a conservative, he’s worth watching because he will call “bullshit” when he sees it, even on his side of the aisle. Maher had a fascinating guest on his May 27th show: it was Scott Adams, the creator of the “Dilbert” cartoons. Adams is not a political analyst but he is a certified hypnotist and a life-long student on the art of persuasive rhetoric.
A recent Washington Post article details six points that illuminates the brilliance of how Trump closed the deal:
- People are basically irrational. Nod your heads now. Even the smartest of us often do irrational things all the time.
- Because people are irrational, they vote on an emotional level. There is no other way to explain the vote for Trump. I would argue that this also applies to a certain segment of the Bernie Sanders voters.
- By running on emotion, facts don’t matter. This drive me crazy but Adams makes a great point:“While his opponents are losing sleep trying to memorize the names of foreign leaders – in case someone asks – Trump knows that is a waste of time. There are plenty of important facts Trump does not know. But the reason he doesn’t know those facts is – in part – because he knows facts don’t matter. They never have and they never will. So he ignores them. Right in front of you.” This is why, in every single debate, the on-line votes showed Trump as having “won” the debate even though the pundits and focus groups (which involve intelligent, thoughtful voters) always gave the debate “wins” to somebody else.
- If facts don’t matter, you can’t be “wrong.” Which is why he never apologizes for anything he says or does because it would make him look weak.
- With fewer facts in play, it’s easier to bend reality.
- Identity is the strongest persuader, and Trump is a master at identity politics. Think “Low Energy” for Jeb, “Little” Marco, “Lyin'” Ted and, now, “Crooked” Hillary. Rubio was onto something in the end, when he started using the phrase “con man” to describe Trump. If he and all of the others started beating that drum a couple of months earlier, it might have made a difference.
So we now can see how Trump won the Republican nomination. On the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton’s path to the nomination was gilded from the very beginning, going back to 1972 when the party decided “no more George McGoverns” and created the super-delegate system. Her nomination was pre-ordained by the party’s donor base and “establishment” (in particular party chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz). This was also true on the Republican side, with the establishment and donor base lining up behind Jeb Bush. So the party pooh-bahs decided that we would have an election between the wife of one president and the brother and son of two others. Of course, the other Republicans didn’t cooperate. Long before Trump got involved, other GOP leaders saw the Bush name as a losing label and thus we had seventeen candidates.
Most other potential Democratic candidates, however, did cooperate and Hillary had a field of a socialist and three unknowns. Even as the email scandal broke last March, the field was left wide open for Secretary Clinton and only the unique message of Bernie Sanders emerged to give her at least a challenge. Of course, Bernie never really had a chance. He raised vastly more money from small donors than she did, he generated far greater enthusiasm than she did but he was unable to make the sale with the African-American voters, who voted for the former first lady in overwhelming numbers. She built up an insurmountable lead in the early southern states with their heavy black voting percentage, resulting in a clean victory based on the popular vote, not on the un-elected super delegates.
So we now have one candidate who is still under investigation by the FBI for possible criminal violations regarding the use of a private email server and another candidate who is the defendant in a class action suit for defrauding people in a bogus real estate school.
We have one candidate who hasn’t given one press conference to the media reporters in 2016 and another one who calls a member of the media a “sleaze” directly to his face during one of his many press conferences.
We have one candidate who won’t release his tax returns (perhaps showing that he’s not quite the mega-billionaire he claims to be) and another one who won’t release transcripts of speeches she gave to Goldman Sachs for a quarter million dollars a pop.
We have one candidate who feels that she is entitled to the presidency due to her marriage and potential status as the first woman president and another candidate who feels solely entitled to hijack the agenda of a party that he isn’t really a part of because he successfully lied his way to the nomination.
Basically, we have two candidates who lie — all the time. Because, as Scott Adams said, facts don’t matter.
I could go on, but I think you’ve had enough.
If you’re still here, thanks for reading. I think you’ll enjoy Part II, which has some proposals and solutions for the future.
Chris Bodig