Oh, sorry. There were two of those promises. The first one came in his pitch for Trump University where Trump promised prospective students (read: marks) that he would only hire professors who were “absolutely terrific; terrific people, terrific brains, successful—we’re going to have the best of the best.”
Donald Trump is currently being sued for fraud stemming from Trump University, which no longer exists.
And then there’s Trump’s promise to staff his presidential administration with only “the best people.”
How’s that working out? Well, there’s the campaign manager who was arrested and charged with committing battery against a female reporter. And now there’s Trump’s delegate operation, which is so disorganized and pathetic that after getting crushed in delegate hunts in three states over the weekend, the Trump campaign’s excuse was “They were unaware of the rules.” So disorganized that Trump’s own children couldn’t get themselves registered in time to vote in the New York primary.
So, don’t say you weren’t warned.
Except, of course, that some very large number of Trump supporters probably haven’t been warned in any meaningful way. Last week a blogger who goes by “Thomas Crown” wrote a long and very thoughtful essay on the Trump phenomenon. I highly recommend printing it out and taking it all in at your leisure.
Crown seems to be a lawyer down South and he begins by describing a client of his, an older lady who sounds like she walked out of a Norman Rockwell frame:
About five miles from my office lives a very nice young lady, who just cleared seventy years out of a womb and on this Earth. We’ll call her Mrs. Martin, because she’s a fairly unassuming woman who would be scandalized to know someone’s writing about her on the internet. (When I asked her if I could, she said, “I don’t think I’m important enough to be on the INTERNET.”) Mrs. Martin is a sometimes-client of mine, a widow whose husband’s love of America was matched only by his love of the United States Navy and Mrs. Martin’s casseroles; she shared his love of America and of those casseroles, but she was sort of sour on the Navy by the time her late husband took his full pension. In her home there are pictures of ships with paint-pen signatures all over; of naval bases in sunset (her husband was a mildly talented amateur photographer and she had an eye for scenery); of children and grandchildren; of Ronald Reagan; of Christ; and of various, mildly kitschy Americana that one finds in homes of those of a certain age. Mrs. Martin lives in a less-than-desirable-but-not-awful neighborhood, one like tens of thousands across the South, where you can walk from a broken shack to a collection of doublewides to some intact-but-not-much-more-base-style-housing to some old-but-well-maintained ranch styles, to some old-but-obviously-expensive-Georgian-eras, in no particular or consistent order, without once leaving the block. Hers is one of the penultimate ones, a lovely little house with a beautiful (if occasionally slightly overrun) front yard and some statuary that look like forlorn, worn angels, not least because that’s what they are. The ethnic breakdown of her neighborhood is much like that in many such neighborhoods across the South, which is to say poor-to-middle-class-to-lower-upper-class whites, poor-to-middle-class blacks, and a passel of folks whose birthplace lies on the other side of the Rio Grande and whose kids were born there or here. The kids either split up by ethnic group to play or not play soccer, or mingle to play baseball or football, or, more recently, to play Jedi and Sith. When I first met Mrs. Martin, I came to her house to discuss her legal troubles. She apologized about twenty minutes in and raced to her oven to pull out cookies, slid them onto a plate in that way older women have of reminding middle-aged-men that we’re useless in kitchens, and raced out to hand them to the neighborhood kids getting off the bus. In a detail that struck me as unexceptional at the time but will be important in a few minutes, she smiled at each kid as he or she got off the bus (no parents around), greeted each by name, and handed each a cookie. She didn’t skimp for any of them, white, black, brown, native-born or almost certainly not. She then hurried back in and we resumed.
Mrs. Martin, or course, turns out to be a Trump supporter. A big one. How, you might wonder, could this lovely woman be so completely unfazed by Trump’s Trumpiness? That’s what Crown couldn’t understand either. So he asked her:
Mrs. Martin loves her Facebook page. She loves keeping up with her children and grandchildren (“They’re teaching me how to use the Skype soon!”) and, she beamed to tell me, her upcoming great-grandchildren. She follows her favorite TV shows and a couple of authors and, of course, The Donald. She reads the Drudge Report, which might be too strong a way to say “she reads the headlines and then goes back to her chores and her Zoomba class.” When I asked her if she’d followed any of the, let us say, indelicacies of the Trump Adventure—boasting of penile length, subtle suggestions that one cannot trust Hispanic judges, being endorsed by open white supremacists, the list is getting depressing— her reaction ranged from sheer disbelief (“There’s no way he said that!”) to polite disbelief (“Why that’s silly, he’s from up North, they don’t join the Klan up there”) to indifference (“Politicians say silly things all the time, he’s just doing what they do”) to approval (“I’m glad someone is standing up for America again”). When I noted that, if some (but not all) of his ramblings could be taken seriously, they would mean that some of the nice children for whom she bakes cookies every day would be forcibly deported, she all but suggested I was insane—no one could possibly mean that, he just meant no more people would come here illegally. What came through, most of all, was that most of the things that would cause most normal Americans to light up Trump’s life at a stake were news to her. Several surveys done in January and February showed that most of Trump’s followers did not know the slew of damaging things he’d said and done; most could not have even imagined them. If you’ve followed the actual news—not the internet, but news channels and news radio—this shouldn’t be a surprise. If you get most of your news from the internet, it’s a different ballgame.
All of which is to say that while Trump’s name-ID is close to total, voter understanding of who the man actually is seems to be lagging quite a bit behind. Which has two implications for the remainder of the race:
(1) It suggests that the notion that nothing Trump does or says hurts him is simply wrong. Trump has a giant field of defensive chaff around him that protects him from attacks. But chaff isn’t foolproof and a determined attack can penetrate it. The reason Trump has survived problems that would have killed other campaigns isn’t that his supporters don’t care about them—it’s that many do not know about them. Ted Cruz should keep attacking. And if he won’t, eventually someone else will.
(2) Trump’s favorable rating right now—currently at a net negative of minus-35_is likely to be not a floor, but a ceiling. If Trump is the nominee, not only is the media suddenly going to start asking him tough questions, but Democrats will spend a billion dollars or so making sure that you don’t need to be on the intertubes to know about Trump’s problems. Everyone in America with a television will know about every creepy thing he’s ever said and every shady thing he’s ever done. And maybe you, personally, won’t care about it. But a lot of the Mrs. Martins of the world will.
