Tom Wolfe says to The American Spectator:
There is a lot of distress and contempt for government and he is capitalizing on that. He has also said a lot of things that are politically incorrect. He comes out and says things like, no more illegal immigrants from Mexico, no more immigrants from Islamic countries, and so on, and a lot of people say, “Hey, yeah, finally, someone has come out and said what I believe.”
Trump is not caught up in the whole ethos of politics. He goes from gaffe to gaffe and it only helps him. I have never seen anything quite like it.
You would think, for example, that his refusal to be on a television program with Megyn Kelly [at Fox News] would hurt him. My God, if you can’t debate Megyn Kelly, what are you going to do with Vladimir Putin? But it didn’t hurt him at all. That seemed to help him also.
I love the fact that he has a real childish side to him, saying things like: I am too worth ten billion! Most politicians would play that down, that they have all this money, but he is determined to let people know that. And he wants people to know that five billion of it comes from just his name—that you can start a hotel and call it Trump and it is going to be a success.
He is a lovable megalomaniac. People get a big kick out of going to his office and behind his desk is this wall of pictures of himself in the news. The childishness makes him seem honest.
Many people have pointed out that he doesn’t present policy programs. There is a great scene in one of George Bernard Shaw’s novels involving an old politician who is talking to his young assistant, and they are going over a speech that he is about to deliver. The young man says, “Sir, what you have said is all principles. There are no programs.” And the old politician says, “Ah, now you are catching on, now you are getting the idea.” That seems to be Trump’s approach…
It is going to be a much more fascinating election than I would have thought. And I have noticed that in publishing, for example, companies are postponing a lot of books, unless they are political, because they think that there is going to be so much interest in this election that people aren’t going to be out buying books.
