From the Journal of American Greatness: The Weekly Standard highlights a perceptive memo, “What Trump Saw and Cruz Did Not,” by Rich Danker on the extraordinary success of the Trump campaign. Danker’s essential point is that Trump is on the cusp of victory because he ignored all the usual advice of Republican campaign consultants and did things that they considered impossible. Instead of “targeting” select constituencies with “big data,” Trump simply campaigned to win every state. Instead of rigidly adhering to a “disciplined” (scripted) message, Trump spoke off the cuff and responded directly to issues of the day. Instead of avoiding national media and favoring “conservative” outlets, Trump gave interviews to virtually anyone, seemingly all the time. Instead of relying on cheesy SuperPac ads, Trump garnered “earned media” by essentially turning his candidacy into the news itself.
Echoing thoughts which have appeared in this Journal on several occasions, Danker writes:
“Political professionals have gotten so much power in presidential campaigns that they have diluted the candidates of a message and put up barriers to getting votes…Why? Being stage-managed gives more power to the consultants. It makes the candidates more dependent on staff and vendors to navigate them through the torture chamber those people make the election into. The consultants become the smart people and the candidate is a commodity. This attitude is shared by the political media, whose access to the candidates is dependent on sharing a worldview about campaigns with those consultants.
It’s giving Trump too much credit to say that he meant to expose the stupidity of professionalized politics, but that’s what he ended up doing. And he got lucky in the sense that his final primary opponent–although in just about every other way the type voters were looking for in 2016–was somebody who leaned on that professionalism.”
Insightful as Danker’s commentary is, however, it overlooks the most critical aspect of Trump’s success. For Trump did not overturn convention merely with his campaign style, but most importantly in taking rather intuitive positions that Republican “professionals” considered politically impossible.
We have discussed Trump’s Greatness Agenda extensively elsewhere, but certain key elements bear repeating: Instead of bowing to the abstract theories of professional economists, Trump has argued that American workers would be better served by policies that would limit jobs being moved out of the country while reducing the number of unskilled laborers flowing into it. Instead of arguing that the Iraq war was a success because…terrible dictator…democracy…surge…Trump did not hesitate to call it an obvious failure. Instead of arguing that we should fight Assad, Russia, ISIS, Egypt, Turkey, etc., all at once, in hopes of democratizing the Middle East, Trump proposed to let Russia bomb ISIS and to let Arabs fight their own sectarian civil wars while the U.S. should simply do whatever is necessary to prevent the conflict and its terrorism from spilling across our own borders. One could go on.
To say that Trump is an iconoclast only in his get-out-the-vote approach, or “framing” of the message, is thus somewhat self-serving. What Trump saw that others did not was that not only were Republican campaign methods self-defeating, but that Republican ideological orthodoxy had become self-contradictory. Indeed, given that “professionalism” or “managerialism” is the defining characteristic of both, it is hard to see one without the other.
It is worth noting that the only remaining Republican candidates all attempted to define their campaigns with a spirit of rebellion, further proof of how discredited conservatism is. Cruz styled himself as the most strident opponent of the “Washington cartel” from his first days in Washington. Kasich showed his independence from conservative orthodoxy in accepting Medicare funding for his state and demonstrating that opposition to Obamacare was not the fundamental issue Republican pundits claimed it was (not to mention his intransigence in staying in the race). Trump is, well, Trump.
