If you had the pleasure of watching last night’s three-hour CNN Republican presidential town hall featuring three of the remaining six candidates in the race (Ted Cruz, Ben Carson, and Marco Rubio), you were privy to something that has been sorely lacking and dearly missed in this primary: thoughtfulness.
The town hall format, which has up to now been exclusively the province of the Democratic presidential field, is not conducive to dramatic turns of events and does not allow for fiery exchanges. That’s precisely what makes them so valuable. Candidates are subjected to thoughtful inquiry from audience members, which requires them to look past their competitors in the race and expound on their thoughts regarding matters substantive and policy-oriented. By way of example, one of the audience members asked Ted Cruz to talk at length on the fluctuations in the price of oil, its destabilizing effects on domestic markets, and how he as president would try to impose some discipline on foreign oil producers which appear to view crude not as a commodity but a geopolitical tool.
For prospective Republican primary voters, it was a satisfyingly edifying evening. The same cannot be said for some counterprogramming on MSNBC in which the singular Donald Trump held his own town hall. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Trump demonstrated that he is the Republican presidential candidate for voters who hate Republicans.
Midway through the evening, “Morning Joe” co-host Mika Brzezinski asked Trump for his response to a simple premise. “I wanted to describe a candidate to you,” she began. “The candidate is considered a political outsider by all of the pundits. He’s tapping into the anger of the voters, delivers a populist message. He believes everyone in the country should have health care, he advocates for hedge fund managers to pay higher taxes. He is drawing thousands of people at his rallies and bringing in a lot of new voters to the political process.”
Anyone with a modest sense of perspective on the race or a passing acquaintance with the concept of analogy knew Brzezinski was referring to the self-described democratic socialist Bernie Sanders. Everyone, that is, except Trump. “You’re describing Donald Trump,” the self-involved candidate offered eagerly. Of course, there are obvious similarities between the two populist candidates, but that any Republican would jump at the opportunity to describe himself as a tax-hiking, universal health care-supporting, anger-stoking populist is, to put it mildly, unique.
Don’t mistake this for a gaffe. It often seemed as though Trump was courting outright the anti-Republican vote. In the wake of the death of Justice Antonin Scalia, conservative voters’ minds have become sharply focused on the likelihood that the next president will have the privilege of nominating a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court. With that in mind, the GOP candidates’ judicial nominating philosophy has taken on outsize importance. Trump’s approach to nominations, to the extent it is coherent, appears rooted in his political values, which were formed when he would have described himself an orthodox Democrat.
Trump bristles with ire when he is reminded of the conventionally pro-choice views he held approximately 38 minutes ago, but the celebrity candidate has never been able to articulate a conversion story or identify the moment or moments when his views on life began to change. After last night, it’s safe to say that’s because such a story doesn’t exist. “It changed years ago,” Trump said of his views on abortion, “and what happened is I saw things with people, and people that I know and people that I respect, that made me change.”
Excuse me while I choke back a tear.
“You’re not going to nominate the type of Supreme Court Justice that always seems to flip?” MSNBC host Joe Scarborough queried.
Tough question. Trump paused to get his bearings. “So if you look at me as a conservative, OK?” he said, setting the table. Well, it’s tough, but for the sake of the hypothetical, we’ll try. “And I’m sure that that’s necessarily the most important word, but I say I’m a common sense conservative,” Trump added, making it even harder to suspend disbelief. For the next 60 seconds or so, Donald Trump described himself as “tough” on immigration and border security, touted his endorsement by Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, and insisted he is “the best with vets.” Eventually amid this drowning man act, Trump landed on the words “second amendment,” at which point he was mercifully rescued by Scarborough who quickly pivoted to Trump’s equally newfound conservative views on gun ownership rights. The guy knows how to pick a venue.
This display was of a kind with the performance Trump has turned in over the last week. He has made an effort to frame the race in South Carolina as not merely a referendum on the 22-month-long run-up to the 2003 Iraq War, but on George W. Bush’s presidency, his handling of the economy, and his failure to prevent the 9/11 attacks. While on MSNBC, Trump made defensible claims rehashing postmortems about the pre-9/11 stove-piping of intelligence and a lack of interagency coordination, but on the stump he goes into full conspiracy theorist mode. There are, Trump averred, “very secret papers” of which he and only he is aware that will demonstrate the Saudi Arabian government was behind the most thoroughly investigated attack in human history. If you’re a “Loose Change” fanatic, this will sound pretty appealing to you. But if you’re a “Loose Change” fanatic, you’re unlikely to call yourself a Republican.
Trump’s dedication to the maintenance of the current unsustainable entitlement burden is well known, but he took his antipathy toward brave conservative reformers to a new level on Wednesday. During a wide-ranging campaign event, Trump contended that he would save Social Security by simply “making our country rich.” Left unsaid is the presumption that he would extract more income out of the private economy in the form of taxation in order to meet Social Security’s ballooning obligations. Trump went a step further by noting that reformers like House Speaker Paul Ryan’s vision for reform is unpopular and, thus, cannot be realized.
“That was the end of that campaign, by the way, when they chose Ryan,” Trump said of Mitt Romney’s decision to name Ryan his vice presidential pick. “I said, ‘You’ve got to be kidding — because he represented cutting entitlements, et cetera, et cetera.’ The only one that’s not going to cut is me.” This is a recently arrived at diagnosis for Romney’s 2012 loss. Four years ago, Trump contended that Romney lost because he was too “mean-spirited” toward illegal immigrants, so choose your own adventure. If the Romney/Ryan entitlement reform plan was so reviled, you would think that would be reflected in the vote of those who are most sensitive to changes in the entitlement structure: seniors. In fact, Romney/Ryan won 56 percent of voters age 65 and over to Obama/Biden’s 44 percent – a better performance than Senator John McCain in 2008 or George W. Bush in 2004.
Trump’s appeal isn’t intellectual; it’s emotional. To the extent that Trump draws support from Americans who call themselves conservatives, it is because he is the candidate most likely to give Republicans indigestion. Trump is the Republican candidate for voters who despise that party. The problem for Trump should he find himself on the ballot in November is that we already have politicians who appeal to voters that hate Republicans. They’re called Democrats.
