Hillary ran a pretty damn great political campaign.
Great convention, check. Embraced most of Bernie’s positions into the Democratic platform, check. Three debates, winner, winner, winner! Baited her opponent into obsessive mistakes and retorts, check. Great ads, check. Raised a shit ton of money, check. Stayed calm and carried on in the face of relentless misogynistic bullying, check. Had the best tag team of speakers ever; Obama, Michele, Bernie, Big Dog, Scrappy Joe, Warren, check. And a top-class GOTV effort, check.
Trump had none of the above.
He didn’t have to have experience, policy positions, a ground game, tax returns, a team, temperament, win debates, a shit ton of money, stay calm, even the Republican Party. NONE OF IT.
Trump ran a reality TV show.
All Trump had to do is turn every day into a reality TV show. Give the butt-hurt white people of Amerika a voice; a rallying cry, a clarion call. The permission to speak. A bullhorn for their hate.
Sound bites flowed: “Lock her up”, “Make America Great Again”, “Nasty Women”. 3am tweets were next day’s news headlines — Mexicans, Muslims, Black Lives Matter, Veterans, the Differently-Abled, Women, Jews, he came for us, one at a time, always calling out our un-Christian, un-White, un-Arian otherness.
He was shameless, an unapologetic bully. And he was the answer. The only requirement, stay relentlessly narcissistic.
Like watching a 7x24 car crash, the news media, including Daily Kos, picked up every horrifying sound bite and amplified it. Policy positions be damned, whoa what’s that, another Trump tweet...
Trump never ran a campaign.
Hint: Trump will run his Presidency the same way.
He will command the center of attention from the White House with a daily serving of bellicose tweets and pronouncements. All he needs to stay in power is to call out the “other” — the Democrats, nasty women, Obamacare, ISIS, the press. And thanks to Obama for not dismantling Bush’s internal wiretapping/email program, Trump need only exercise his legal right spy on all of us to separate out the targets for his cyber brown shirts. Paul Ryan’s budget will do the rest.
