While the media seems unable or unwilling to figure out Donald Trump, there is a very simple explanation for the way he has approached the campaign: he is a consummate huckster. So what is a huckster? Hucksters are different from good salesman, who are people who want to establish an ongoing relationship with their purchasers, so they try to work with a potential purchaser to match the seller’s products or services with the needs of the purchaser. Because they are counting on repeat business with the purchaser, good salesman will also try to solve problems which arise post-sale.
Hucksters can be understood by this story. I once got a print ad for legal review. I called the marketing guy responsible for the ad and said, “I know that this one sentence is false, and I’m only a lawyer. You know it’s false, and the management of the division that makes the product knows that it’s false. Worse, the FTC will figure out it’s false rather quickly, even if a helpful competitor doesn’t point it out to them. So why would you say this?” He replied that “it sounded good”.
That is the essence of hucksterism: truth doesn’t enter into the making of a statement; the only question is whether it sounds good enough to influence a short term outcome, usually taking your money, that the huckster wants to bring about. If your only goal is to take the money and run, then it doesn’t matter what you say because lying has no adverse consequence.
Trump has been a huckster all his life. His idea of sales is to say whatever will cause a sale to happen, and leaving it to lawyers to get him out of paying for the lie, if necessary. This year’s Presidential Election process is the ideal place for a huckster like Trump because there is no downside to lying constantly since you either get enough votes to win or you don’t. Either way, it doesn’t matter what you say to get those votes, unless you have a moral center that rejects lying, which Trump certainly doesn’t, or you are concerned about governing after the election, which Trump certainly has not considered. Furthermore, Trump has a convenient context in which to practice his brand of hucksterism, since the Republican party has been lying almost everything for decades as it can’t admit that it exists solely to make the rich richer. Trump has merely thrown aside any pretext that what he says has to make any sense or be based in reality or truth. It merely has to sound good.
Trump is aided and abetted in his hucksterism by the media which has also abandoned any concern with truth or reality. The owners of the media have no interest in accuracy, so they long ago got their employees to drop the thought themselves. Thus, the media only reports controversies and maintains “fairness” by creating lots of false equivalences. Thus they say things like “both candidates make false statements”, rather than pointing out that Hillary’s are minor misstatements and few in number, while Trump lets loose with a steady stream of outright lies. Which is rather short-sighted of the press, as it seems all but certain that a President Trump will want to emulate his pal President Putin and make every effort to muzzle the press.