Donald Trump is smarter than you think he is. He may not know squat about being President, but he does knows know what ordinary Republicans want, and he knows how to play the game to win.
Rather than fuming and sputtering in disbelief about how a bombastic, ham-handed buffoon is still, more or less, the leading contender for his party's nomination, I've been carefully observing what The Donald says and does to discover his strategy. You may have noticed that the talking heads on TV have a shallow, non-analytical explanation for the Trump phenomenon. Now that they have given up dismissing his candidacy as a transient fluke and have begun to accept him as a serious candidate. They are still dismissive, smiling, giving a shake of the head, and saying something like, "It doesn't make any sense, but he's still on top."
They don't get it. Donald knows exactly what he's doing and everything he says or does is part of a carefully wrought plan. The behavior comprises his tactics. Taken in isolation, most of the things that Trump says don't make much sense. But, considered in their full context, each utterance fits nicely into the master plan. Yes, he has one, and it's not based on pie-in-the-sky ideals or lofty aspirations. This plan, this strategy, is the underlying conceptual framework that brings the various tactical maneuvers together into a coherent whole.
If anything, The Donald is employing game theory, which he learned in graduate school at the Wharton School of The University of Pennsylvania, the first business school founded in the nation. Part of the curriculum in most B-schools, especially in their MBA programs, is game theory as applied to business management. The thing about game theory is that it's about winning, not standing for principles or serving the people. Like any CEO, Trump's mission is to "maximize profit," not wave the flag, glorify Jesus or be kind to little animals. In business, "winning" means accumulating wealth. In politics, it means getting votes, and subsequently power, then ultimately wealth, because you can't even hold onto the power you have if you don't have a lot of money.
Thinking this way seems odd and somewhat uncomfortable to most people because the generally approved social ethos is a pastiche of romantic idealism, Trump is applying what he learned in an ordered sequence of ploys.
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Agree with the competition on all the stupid, extraneous non-issues on which no one, even a Republican, can deliver. In other words, pander to the dupes to build a solid body of approval in the party base. No one is going to succeed in rolling back advances in gender and LGBT equality. Obamacare will not be repealed. Trying to disenfranchise people of color, the young, the old, the poor and any other group that does not vote Republican is a losing battle. Pretending climate change is not that big a deal is just stalling. Stricter gun safety laws and regulation of firearms are inevitable; pretending they are not is just pandering. So, that's what you do. You promise people who might vote for you all kinds of things that you have no intention of actually getting for them. Did G. W. Bush create jobs, keep us safe from terrorists, take care of us in natural disasters, rebuild the infrastructure, improve the schools or anything else that everyone wants? Did he stop all abortions? No. All he did was funnel more money to his cronies. That's Trump's plan, too, but he doesn't advertise it any more than other Republicans. It's their dirty little secret that they have all agree to, and he's just playing along. That's gamesmanship.
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Set yourself apart from the competition on a small number of issues where most Republicans don't actually agree with the "party line." This may be the single most clever thing that Trump has been doing. He comes off as just slightly less crazy than the rest of the Republican presidential aspirants. The Donald still touts plenty of bizarre, outrageous lunacy, but here and there he emits a glimmer of sanity. Examples of this are hinting that a national health care system might be a good thing and suggesting that financial sector regulation is a reasonable idea. Trump dares to say that the wealthy should pay higher taxes, which is anathema to Republican fatcats. Donald knows that most Republicans are not wealthy and that they do not think the same as their corporate masters. In office, he might not do anything different than any other Republican, but he hints that he might. The intent is to once again delude the gullible into thinking that the Republicans want to do anything that benefits the populace at large.
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Knock off viable competitors, one rival at a time, until the only people left are those you can't ignore and will have to negotiate with. This means that fringe candidates, those with no real base of support, can be ignored for the most part. Trump has taken potshots at candidates with low rankings, but he doesn't do a full-scale attack unless someone looks has recently moved up and is likely to continue to move up in the rankings. He derided Carly Fiorina when she started to surge, but hasn't talked about her since it became clear that the "dead baby speech" in the debate turned off so many people that her candidacy is dead. He won't attack her again unless she starts to surge again. He's now brutalizing Bush and will continue until Jeb folds completely, which may happen, but not until his $100,000,000 war chest runs down substantially. After that, you won't hear a peep about Jeb Bush from Donald Trump.
- When things get close to the end game, form an alliance with another candidate for the top job who realizes that without Trump, he or she has no chance whatsoever of being on the national ticket. This person will be Donald's choice for Vice President. It doesn't have to be the candidate who's running second, and it won't be if Trump can get someone else to abandon their own candidacy and throw their support to him with enough delegate votes to put him over the top. In fact, he might purposefully offer such a deal to the candidate with the least number of delegate votes that still add up up to enough to give Trump the nomination. Remember, all he's trying to do is win. It doesn't matter by how much or what tactics he employs; it's the "bottom line" that counts. (It's the classic business school world view!)
The reason for choosing a weaker running mate is that the less of a threat the VP pick is, the more dependent that person is on Trump. This lackey will be a good little soldier and do everything asked of him or her because being President of the Senate is a whole lot more prestigious than being a commentator on Fox News. Such practical considerations will probably result the stooge's being another steely-eyed, remorseless sociopath without a streak of idealism or commitment to principle.
Enough about game theory. Let’s talk about how Trump is working all the angles to his own advantage and positioning himself to take charge.
You might think that Dr. Ben Carson, who is a Seventh Day Adventist, might be precluded from joining forces with Trump because of his purported moralist principles. He thinks he has been anointed by God because, as a member of that small fundamentalist Christian sect, he is the standard bearer of God's true message. Hence, no one else will do as the Republican Party's nominee. Carson might not endorse Trump because he sees The Donald as the Antichrist. (I do, and I'm not even a Christian!)
Trump can't make a deal with a delusional dreamer; he needs another calculating pragmatist. However, while I thought at first that Carson was mainly a deluded fanatic, it seems in light of recent revelations about all the lies he’s been telling about himself, he might just be the ideal remorseless sociopath Trump needs. With his flattened affect and ability to lie straight-faced, who could be a better foil for Trump to further delude gullible simpletons?
We won't know if Carson will be shut out or end up embracing Trump until Trump makes his pick for VP to clinch the nomination for himself. If it's Carson, which would really surprise me, it would mean that the amiable doctor truly has feet of clay and is selling out to the Devil for the big payoff. Ben has it in him to do this; make no mistake.
In the last debate, he proved himself to be a shameless liar, as willing to perjure himself as any of his cohorts. His denial of his decade-long gig as a spokesman for Mannatech, a shady purveyor dietary supplements, and his cavalier dismissal of such assertions as "propaganda", mean that he can, and does, lie. He's not shading the truth, fibbing a little or bending reality. That was a flat out howler of a lie. The fact that he has the audacity to look people in the eye and say things like that proves that he has no principle whatsoever. In fact, that may be proof that he's a true sociopath, which is more serious than just having a few sociopathic tendencies. Did you notice how his tone didn't alter? Did he not give just enough of a denial to get everyone to stop talking about it? It was masterful.
Carson is just as much of a snake oil salesman as Huckabee with his cinnamon pills that don't cure cancer. Nobody challenges the former governor of Arkansas about those ads because Mike will never be President or even get the Republican nomination. Everyone knows that, so no one picks on him because he's not a threat. Lest we forget about sociopathy, one of the hallmarks of that disorder is that sociopaths can lie with a straight face, and sometimes even fool a lie detector. OK. Carson's got that down.
Another sociopathic tendency is an utter lack of empathy. This is harder to detect, but it's there. Carson's blithe mouthing of the insane Republican drivel about health savings accounts and other easy rationales for privatized, for-profit medicine might make you think he's delusional and believes such crapola. But Dr. Ben is a smart man, and he obviously knows what things mean and how money functions in medicine. His calm, unflappable demeanor is mainly a lack of empathy. He knows that American health care is a catastrophe, a demonic farce, but he calmly says that it is just fine. He obviously just doesn't care one whit about anyone, despite all the good works members of his faith are famous for.
Donald hasn't laid into Ben much yet, but once he's cleared the field some more, if Carson is still in the race and a serious threat, watch for the oblique attacks on Carson's business dealings and his religion. It's all dog whistle politics for the crank Republicans. All they have to know is that Carson belongs to what many mainstream Christians consider a cult. It's pretty weird if you don't know about it.
Carson’s Seventh-Day Adventist Church is what's left of the Millerites. Miller was a nut job who predicted the world would end, twice. Each time, the faithful sold or gave away their earthly possessions, put on white robes and sat on a hilltop with Miller awaiting the Second Coming. When they reorganized after the Millerite cult collapsed, they quietly stopped preaching Armageddon and focused on having services on Saturday and being vegetarians. They're still pretty much a cult, but they keep a low profile and dedicate themselves to doing good work. Nice folks, on the whole. (I know this because I lived with a Seventh-Day Adventist family for a year as a child.)
So, how will The Donald attack Ben Carson on his faith? He already did it by explicitly state that Carson is a member of that church, and that he, Trump, is a, "Presbyterian! Presbyterian! I'm a Presbyterian!" That's enough for Bible-thumping bigots to ask, "What's a Seventh-Day Adventist, anyway?" When they find out that it's not anything like being a Baptist, Methodist or Pentecostal adherent, they will stop liking Carson. Trump doesn't have to ever play the Hitler card to take out Carson, but he could. ("Seventh-Day Adventists are vegetarians. Hitler was a vegetarian. Are you Hitler?") I don't think it will go that far because Trump will take out or subsume Carson by subtler means. (For instance, members of the SDA Church are often conscientious objectors.) The important thing to remember is that Trump is perfectly willing to do whatever it takes to win, including attack someone's religion. All speculation ceases about picking someone to be Trump's running mate as soon as a rival is taken out, or destroys his or her own candidacy on their own.
This is why Marco Rubio may be most likely to get the nod from Trump. Marco is still strong and a threat. You won't see Trump say much that’s bad about young Rubio because he's probably being groomed for VP. Well, Donald will continue to attack Marco obliquely whenever the young Florida senator moves up enough to threaten him, but it will be just enough to take Rubio down a peg or two. This guy could be the perfect choice for VP because he doesn't believe anything and will loudly proclaim his advocacy of whatever position will get him the most votes. Look at his waffling on immigration. Religion? He was raised a Catholic, converted to Mormonism for a while, then reverted to Catholicism once it became fashionable among Republicans. (All, not some, but ALL the Republicans on the Supreme Court are Roman Catholics. Yes.) On every other issue, he's right down the line with all the absurd ideas held by hard-core Republicans. Like Trump, Rubio knows that you have to get the nomination first, then adjust to win in the general election. Hmm... This fits in with the last aspect of The Donald's master plan.
- Once the nomination is in hand, adopt a rousing populist doctrine. He'll even explain what he's doing. It will be described as "broadening his base" and "political pragmatism". It's all that, but it's also insidiously disingenuous.
Just like Ronald Reagan, Trump will present himself as a champion of ordinary people while secretly colluding with corporate fatcats to gut the economy and loot all the money, drive the general populace down to a level of misery where they can more easily be controlled, and institutionalize corporate control of the nation and its resources. (Don't think it's that bad? Read up on Silvio Berlusconi and how he bought his way into becoming prime minister of Italy.) If he gets the Republican nomination, Donald J. Trump will tack so far to "the left", at least in his speeches, that ordinary people will be hard pressed to understand the difference between his positions and those of the Democratic Party's nominee. But, it will all be sophistry. He wil say that he wants everyone to have health care, but he won't push for anything that cuts a dollar from the health care extortion cabal's ill-gotten gains. He wil say that he wants fair taxation, but all he will try to promote is more tax cuts for the top 1%. He will say that he cares about little puppies and kitty-cats, but he would stomp a bagful of baby chicks if that's what it took to be President.
Trump is a monster. If you can stomach it, watch any episode of The Apprentice and tell me that the idea of that man in the Oval Office doesn't make you ill. Just because he’s a clown, though, doesn’t mean that he’s incompetent or stupid. This guy could take it all and he’s got the skills to pull it off. Don’t underestimate him.