On a Sunday-morning talk show in December 2015, a rising politician had this to say about Senator Ted Cruz’s campaign for president, “Look at the way he’s dealt with the Senate, where he goes in there—like, you know, frankly, like a little bit of a maniac. You’re never going to get things done that way. . . . You can’t walk into the Senate, and scream, and call people liars, and not be able to cajole and get along with people. He’ll never get anything done. And that’s the problem with Ted.”
Who was this observant political figure?
It was Donald J. Trump, our screaming, lying, maniacal president who has shown an utter inability to cajole and get along with people.
It is this brand pivot, from a dealmaking anti-establishment businessman to an extremist far-right firebrand that has limited the president’s political aspirations more than anything else, in a way that is underappreciated by most of the political chattering class, for whom the concept of “Donald Trump, centrist dealmaker” never really took.
These liberal elites and Never Trumpers saw him from day one as a demagogic extremist, preying on racial animus, and throwing in with the seedier elements of the far right like Steve Bannon. But many of the (white) voters out in the rest of America who supported him in 2016 didn’t see him quite this way. They knew that he had taken a hard line on some issues like immigration. But they also saw the host of The Apprentice, a businessman outside the political system. They noticed he was willing to buck the Republicans on certain unpopular ideological totems like cutting Social Security or supporting “forever wars.” To many of those who ended up voting for him, it was Trump who was the moderating figure while Cruz (in the primary) and Clinton (in the general) were on the extremes.
Trump went out of his way to burnish this image. In the 2012 Republican primary, candidates were so scared to admit they would work with Democrats that famously every candidate on stage raised their hand when asked if they would walk away from a wildly lopsided deal with Democrats on spending cuts vs. tax increases. In 2016, Trump didn’t share this orthodoxy. He frequently discussed his ability to cut good deals with Democrats and made it part of his appeal. In a New Hampshire debate ahead of the 2016 primary he was asked about this by conservative journalist Mary Katharine Ham and replied: “With Congress you have to get everybody in a room and you have to get them to agree . . . you have to get people in, grab them, hug them, kiss them, and get the deal done.”
And since Trump was a businessman with vast experience hugging and kissing without consent . . . voters bought it!
Sir Tainley