Donald Trump’s campaign slogan is “Make America great again.” His flurry of events in the nation’s capital Monday were clearly aimed at making himself look presidential for the first time.
The results were mixed at best.
Trump’s session with congressional Republicans near the Capitol was initially billed as him hosting “a group of nearly two dozen influential Republicans,” his “first major meeting with lawmakers and key Republican figures since last fall.”
While some of the group Trump ultimately met with certainly fit the description of “influential Republicans,” he had a former House speaker (Newt Gingrich) and a would-be speaker (Bob Livingston) but not the current speaker.
In fact, House Speaker Paul Ryan devoted much of his American Israel Public Affairs Committee conference speech to implicitly rebuking Trump’s foreign policy views.
The group that met with Trump was disproportionately made up of members of Congress who already support the billionaire, so it wasn’t that much of a party unity event or sign of the establishment coalescing around his candidacy.
Then there was Trump’s rollout of a foreign policy advisory team of sorts. It was progress, given that he’d repeatedly failed to identify sources of national security advice beyond “the shows” and some individuals he had previously named seemed reluctant to accept the association.
But not everyone was impressed with the new additions to Trump’s list. Typically, a presidential candidate positioned where Trump currently is in the Republican race would be able to cite past GOP secretaries of state dating back to Henry Kissinger as at least nominal advisers, not Walid Phares (although Phares did advise Mitt Romney in 2012).
Trump gave some more substantive than usual interviews, one to CNN and the other to the Washington Post’s editorial board. The former generated new headlines about Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly, the latter resulted in him calling a female reporter “beautiful” and being quoted as saying unfair journals should “face some form of a trial.”
At AIPAC, Trump gave a traditional political speech read in a more subdued manner than usual from a teleprompter. Unexpectedly, this was probably his most successful foray in to D.C. politics Monday, although even here reviews were mixed.
But Trump did get a lot of applause from the AIPAC audience, which isn’t a partisan Republican crowd. He did not commit any gaffes. And he perhaps previewed how he would pivot in a general election, as he repeatedly took pro-Israel positions that were at variance with his past comments about neutrality and moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem.
Trump has gotten this far by breaking all the rules. As the front-runner, he now needs the rest of the party to observe the political norms he has flouted regularly. Convincing Republicans he can be presidential is a key part of this process.
It looks like he still has his work cut out for him.
