One of the contributing factors that keep Donald Trump at or near the top of the polls of Republican voters is his trademark obstinacy.
Those who love him see his mulishness as uncompromising. They regard traditional politicians as weak-kneed vacillators, and they see Trump’s bull in a china shop act as refreshingly raw and unpretentious. For Trump’s detractors on the right, these are not political virtues.
Those voters see in Trump someone who is inclined to indulge conspiratorial thinking and who encourages in voters a sense of victimization. Sure, he’s no traditional politician, but a traditional politician would avoid making so many rhetorical misstatements that take him off his campaign message, derail the news cycle, and render his personal image toxic.
It cannot be called truthfulness because Trump is by no means an honest broker, but the species of bluntness the real estate mogul has made his calling card is as much an asset as it is a liability. Through scandal, controversy, and a rollercoaster ride in the polls, Trump has held tightly to that brusqueness. Regardless of how uncouth his behavior or alienating his remarks, the reality television star has refused to ever express a hint of guilt. It is a testament to just how bad of a week he’s had that Trump appears to be abandoning his favored tactic.
In a revealing interview with New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, Trump did something that few voters have seen him do over the course of his nearly year-long campaign for the White House: He expressed regret. “Yeah, it was a mistake,” Trump said of his decision to re-tweet an image of Senator Ted Cruz’s wife, Heidi Cruz, in what was supposed to be a physically unflattering comparison between her and Trump’s wife, Melania. “If I had to do it again, I wouldn’t have sent it.”
While that stops short of an apology, it’s a remarkable departure for the candidate’s characteristic remorseless. “He started it,” Trump said while defending his decision to disseminate approvingly the offensive meme attacking his chief rival’s wife in an interview with Wisconsin-based radio host Charlie Sykes. “If he didn’t start it, it never would have happened, nothing like this would have ever happened. But he started it.” The contrasting tone Trump struck in his interview with Dowd, a tone his interlocutor described as “chastened,” did not end there.
Many have observed the incident involving the allegation that Trump Campaign Manager Corey Lewandowski engaged in unwanted physical contact with former Breitbart reporter Michelle Fields would not have snowballed had the Trump campaign simply offered the young reporter an apology. When asked if that would have just been the politically smarter course, if not just the decent one, Trump concurred. “You’re right,” he said, “but from what I understand, it wouldn’t have mattered.”
That’s quite a reversal. Team Trump responded to the initial report — corroborated by eyewitnesses and independently verified audio — by impugning Fields’ character and insisting that she had made it all up. It was that put-up-or-shut-up attitude that compelled Fields to file a criminal complaint with a local Florida police department; a complaint that led investigators to conclude there was probable cause to arrest Lewandowski on the charge of simple battery. Trump’s response to that campaign-altering event was to triple down.
In a press conference the day of the arrest, the celebrity candidate insisted that the surveillance tape evidence didn’t show anything and, if it did, Fields deserved it. “She was running up and grabbing and asking questions, and she wasn’t supposed to be doing that,” Trump insisted. He later contended that the pen Fields was using to take notes on the fly might have been a weapon, or even an improvised explosive device. “How do you know those bruises weren’t there before?” Trump later added. “She said she had a bruise on her arm. If you’re going to get squeezed, wouldn’t you think she would have yelled out a scream or something if she has bruises on her arm?”
Trump’s about-face in his interview with Dowd is a dramatic transition for his campaign, and it’s not just talk. The candidate has long stood by his embattled campaign manager – literally, shoulder-to-shoulder, if only to antagonize the press. According to Politico, however, the campaign manager’s role is shrinking, the candidate’s inner circle is expanding, and successors to Lewandowski are being groomed. The campaign sources who spoke to reporters confess that their candidate and his family are increasingly concerned by their campaign manager’s temper and his performance.
It is hard to say that this is not a response to the cratering of Trump’s appeal with women voters – even white, Republican women. Even before the kerfuffle over Trump’s Cruz tweet or his boorish claim that Fields orchestrated an elaborate conspiracy to defame his campaign, Trump’s popularity among white women – a demographic Mitt Romney carried – was just 23 percent, according to a recent New York Times/CBS News survey. Trump’s behavior in his interview with Dowd suggests the bottom has fallen out of his backing among this critical voting bloc.
COMMENTARY’s Jonathan Tobin observed, however, that Trump’s bad week was capped off by what may be more damaging than all of these infractions. Trump’s claim that he believed certain abortion practices should be banned and that the individual women who undergo those procedures must be punished set off a firestorm that has not yet abated. Trump’s campaign instantly issued a perfectly unconvincing statement attempting to backtrack, but the candidate has continued to stumble over his own message. It was a revealing episode. It demonstrated that Trump has no core convictions on an issue as central to the conservative identity as abortion. His were the comments of an imposter striking a pose for a group of voters he does not truly understand.
“This was not real life,” Trump told Dowd when asked of his original offending comment. “This was a hypothetical, so I thought of it in terms of a hypothetical. So, that’s where that answer came from, hypothetically.” That’s cold comfort. Dowd asked the celebrity candidate if, in all the well-documented years he spent as a lascivious playboy, he had ever patronized an abortion services provider. “Such an interesting question,” Trump replied. “So what’s your next question?”
Dowd’s interview is compelling and illuminating, and she has emerged one of media’s most competent interrogators of the celebrity candidate. While her thoughtful interviews and the accompanying analysis provide much needed new insights into the enigmatic figure at the top of the polls of GOP voters, her latest interview revealed something utterly alien for Trump campaign watchers: a sense of remorse.
