The Scrapbook confesses that its one big surprise, thus far, in the 2016 presidential campaign has been Donald Trump’s announcement of his candidacy. We are not surprised that he is running for the Republican nomination—although it can be difficult, at times, to tell which party would be most compatible with Trump—but that he is running at all. Donald Trump has been threatening to run for president for the better part of three decades but, until this year, had never actually taken the plunge.
Now that he has done so, from the lobby of Trump Tower in Manhattan, complete with a TV-friendly red necktie and an alleged rent-a-crowd of actors cheering his words, The Scrapbook is emboldened to guess that Trump is not likely to win the nomination. To begin with, a significant percentage of Americans (including, perhaps especially, Republicans) seem to regard him as something of a public buffoon, a well-known “character,” not the national redeemer. The famous property developer and reality-television star has never run for public office and has no credible campaign apparatus. Having emerged not too long ago from bankruptcy, he is no doubt reluctant to spend very much of his own money on this venture. Moreover, at 69, Trump is the only one among the Republican candidates who is eligible for Medicare. He’s even older than Hillary Clinton.
So why is he running? Probably because he believes that a presidential run, even a sham candidacy such as this appears to be, will do his business and personal renown no harm. His fame and fortune give him access to the media; his penchant for quotable one-liners (“I will be the greatest jobs president that God ever created”) is well earned. He might prove to be an entertaining wild card in debates.
Above all, however, we are living in a golden age of amateur candidates. The last nonpolitician to be elected president (1952) was the general who won World War II. Before that, the charismatic utilities executive Wendell Willkie gained the 1940 GOP nomination but was beaten decisively by Franklin D. Roosevelt. Since then, we’ve had comedians (Pat Paulsen 1968) who ran for president as a joke, and then more or less seriously; and one television evangelist (Pat Robertson 1988) who placed second in the Iowa caucuses. We’ve had boomlets for retired generals (James Gavin 1968), trial balloons from businessmen (Lee Iacocca 1988), and actual candidacies by pundits (Patrick Buchanan 1992, 1996) and computer magnates (H. Ross Perot 1992, 1996). In 2012 the pizza mogul Herman Cain sought the Republican nomination; this year neurosurgeon Ben Carson is running.
The record is not encouraging. But the peculiar genius of Donald Trump is that he manages to combine a certain seriousness of purpose (“I will stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons”) with declarations worthy of Pat Paulsen (“I’m not using donors. . . . I’m really rich”) and so will be noticed, and reported on, even if his candidacy is doomed. At this juncture, the best The Scrapbook can say is that it is better to have a big, diverse crowd of candidates than a narrow, depopulated field. The worst The Scrapbook can say is that, in 1992, H. Ross Perot won 19 million votes and might well have delivered the presidency to Bill Clinton.
