In re Trump: I’m calling it now. Stick a fork in him, he’s done. Hillary wins in a moderate-to-major landslide. The Trumpenproletariat collapses in on itself. None of the normal campaign brouhaha, or the oh-so-disturbingly-close polling, will matter. Prediction’s down on the mat, 85%+ confidence.
[…barring some kind of huge late-October surprise, that is. But it would have to be very surprising.]
It’s not because of the unpleasantly rapey comments, of course. Not directly. Is anyone seriously surprised that The Donald has that kind of attitude towards his interactions with women? Does anyone seriously believe that there are potential Trump supporters who (a) are inclined to be bothered by that kind of thing, but (b) haven’t yet firmly decided to swallow their personal revulsion?
It’s because he apologized.
I mean, technically this isn’t the first time, he’s made statements labeled “apologies” before. But this is the first time it’s sounded remotely…contrite, or even fake-contrite. For all that the Times isn’t satisfied with his level of abject sincerity (surprise!), he’s actually using the language of “I did a genuinely bad thing and I regret it.” He’s acting like someone who thinks he can’t get away with doing what he got caught doing.
And, as far as I can tell, this kills his only selling point. He’s supposed to be the Hammer of SJWs, the invincible culture-war hero who cannot be bowed by the self-righteous left, the Man Who Never Apologizes. He pisses off the hated liberal elites, he tweaks their noses, he laughs as they fume and scold and go apeshit in their thinkpieces. That’s it. That’s what he’s got. I don’t think there are substantial numbers of people who seriously expect any kind of desired policy change to come from a Trump administration, even with regard to much-ballyhooed issues like immigration; the animating spirit of his movement is annoyance at domestic culture foes.
Now he’s just another weakling cuckservative. We’re finished here.
An incisive point fundamentally, but it’s possible people might overestimate the impact of this. The systemic incentives to bounce back are very strong (as anyone reading daveweigel’s reporting can see evidence of.)
If this came out in July, I might bet against you.
However, tonight is a debate, which will almost certainly provide another week of life for this explosion. And we’re less than a month from the election.
France’s LePen family provides a decent analogy for what happens to “blowhard populist and the political movement he coalesced”. Answer? His more competent daughter takes it over from him.
…it’s an interesting question, I guess. Yeah, haha, I can imagine Ivanka (or someone like her) pushing the right-populist build-the wall-and-bring-back-the-jobs “policy” line more competently than her dad ever did. And she’s a hot girl, so that’s some points right there with the relevant crowd.
But, like…can she channel the rage? Can she make you feel like she’s really sticking it to the goddamn SJWs who look down on you? The Trumpenproletariat, I think, cares way more about that than its far-right European counterparts do.
It’s not a gender thing; Sarah Palin did it pretty well. But I have some sense that it’s very hard to juggle that with the sort of calm, respectable, professional competence that the Trump campaign is missing so much right now. A lot of “competence” boils down to “knowing how not to shoot yourself in the foot pissing off the elites,” and, well…
Maybe what you need is an absolutely valueless, cynical, duplicitous creature like Ann Coulter. Someone who can put on the Trump Face, and take it off again, without missing a beat. We’ve already seen this year that you’d never have to acknowledge the contradiction.