Luigi Zingales (a professor of entrepreneurship and finance at University of Chicago) has a must read piece up on the New York Times on lessons of how to beat Trump by studying Silvio Berlusconi. It is fascinating and in retrospect leads one to question Secretary Clinton’s attacks against him.
Berlusconi has a similar story with Trump- Billionaire business man turned politician , with sex scandals . Ultimately, he had a 9 year run as the leader of Italy and it was good for the people of ITALY. See another article of his from 2011 which discusses that in more detail
Mr. Berlusconi was able to govern Italy for as long as he did mostly thanks to the incompetence of his opposition. It was so rabidly obsessed with his personality that any substantive political debate disappeared; it focused only on personal attacks, the effect of which was to increase Mr. Berlusconi’s popularity.
As bad as Trump is, Zingales points out the flaw of Clinton’s attacks.
We saw this dynamic during the presidential campaign. Hillary Clinton was so focused on explaining how bad Mr. Trump was that she too often didn’t promote her own ideas, to make the positive case for voting for her. The news media was so intent on ridiculing Mr. Trump’s behavior that it ended up providing him with free advertising.
His secret, from watching the two men who beat Berlusconi?
Both of them treated Mr. Berlusconi as an ordinary opponent. They focused on the issues, not on his character. In different ways, both of them are seen as outsiders, not as members of what in Italy is defined as the political caste.
He argues that attacking Trump’s personality, highlighting his tweets (my opinion- such as the ones like Pence/Hamilton) only make him more popular with his supporters.
His final, obvious point, at which there is no answer yet
Finally, the Democratic Party should also find a credible candidate among young leaders, one outside the party’s Brahmins.
Who can that be? The party has 2-3 years to figure that out. But as a lesson, maybe there is something to this. Maybe Trump should be analyzed only as an ineffective politician bad for the “everyman”. The Clinton team did not seem to take this lesson.. Hopefully the next leaders do and attack Trump in a way he is not used to- as a standard politician