It’s common for political observers to shake their heads at Donald Trump. How does he get away with what he gets away with? And what is he really up to? Most recently, some observers noted Trump’s victory news conference Tuesday night and thought it was somehow an effort to sell Trump Steaks and Trump Water.
This is by no means a comprehensive explanation, but on Wednesday, Rush Limbaugh sought to decipher some of Trump’s appeal. He took as his text a Politico article headlined “How are they losing to this guy?” with the subheading, “Trump’s opponents are getting beaten by a man who uses election-night press conferences to peddle his brand of steaks and bottled water.”
The Limbaugh explanation, lightly edited for readability:
That’s not what [Trump] did last night. That’s what you saw. But that’s not what he did. How do these people continue to miss this?
They don’t even know how to watch Trump now. They don’t even know how to see Donald Trump the way people voting for him see him. And not just the people not voting for him, they don’t have the ability to see him the way any American watching that last night on TV sees him. But if your takeaway from Trump’s press conference last night was that it was, A, an attempt to sell Trump steaks or Trump water, you are missing the boat so badly, it’s embarrassing, if that’s what you think that was about last night.
Okay, I’ll just tell you. Trump extolled the virtues of his winery. It formerly was owned, 2,600 acres, I think, in Virginia by John Kluge, who was the Metromedia grand pooh-bah. Now, I’ve never had Trump wine, and it may be fine, but he’s saying it’s the finest wine in the world, and I will guarantee you the people at Chateau Latour, Chateau Lafite Rothschild are looking at that and chortling.
Who in the world is gonna believe that Trump vinegar is in any way comparable to what they produce in Bordeaux? But he says it and people eat it up. The thing that people don’t get, you have these people like at Politico or anywhere, the Washington establishment party officials, both Democrats and Republicans, and they watch this and they wring their hands, and they say, “Oh, my God, oh, this is so embarrassing, oh, this is so bad, oh, oh, this is so offensive.” They do not understand that Trump knows he’s putting everybody on and the trick is that he knows his audience knows.
I’ll give you an example of this. Donald Trump knows that his wine is not the best stuff in the world, but his schtick is that everything he does is the best in the world. He’s got the best friends. He’s got the best clubs. He’s got the best golf course. He’s got the best this, and everybody says so. And you laugh about it, you laugh at it. He’s not the kind of braggart that offends people. He’s a braggart that endears himself to people. It’s a personality thing. And the hidden bond, I call it, this invisible way that Trump has of connecting with people. Some people refer to it as the “it” factor, Q number, there’s any number of ways to quantify it and to describe it. You can’t see it; you just know it when you see it.
But Trump knows his wine’s not the best in the world, and he knows people know that. He says it anyway, and everybody laughs along with him and they think it’s great and they think it’s marvelous, think it’s cute, whatever they think. But they don’t get offended by it, like Mitt Romney’s getting offended or like somebody else is getting offended. They know that some of the things Trump says, like bringing iPhone production back, they don’t really expect that to happen. Nobody’s electing Trump convinced that iPhones are gonna be made in America and all kinds of new jobs.
The key to that I think is, this is the way Trump telegraphs his preferences and his support for people. How many times have I asked people to note — and it happened last night two or three times; it always does. Sometimes they’re fleeting, the moments, sometimes they take 30 seconds. But at least three times in every one of these hour-long either press conferences or speeches, Trump goes all humble. He goes total humility. He thanks everybody, he tells them what an honor it is, and they hear it and they know it.
They recognize the bluster for what it is, and they’re not offended by it. And this is what I think people can’t see. And if they, again, just to illustrate, if they think the point of this thing last night was a cheap sales gimmick to sell Trump steaks, that’s not what he was doing.
Limbaugh didn’t offer a grand, universal Theory of Trump. But his point was that Trump has a talent for communicating with people in a way that some in the media fail to understand. Coming from a man who is a highly effective (and sometimes controversial) communicator himself, that’s something to think about.
