Taking Donald Trump seriously

In a WMUR Granite State New Hampshire poll taken a short time earlier, Trump again placed ahead of Huckabee, Carson, Perry, Santorum, Fiorina, Jindal, Kasich, and Graham.

In Iowa, Craig Robinson, a former state GOP official and founder of the Iowa Republican blog, recently published a piece headlined “It’s hard to ignore Trump when he’s doing all the right things.” “Trump has spent more time in Iowa this year than Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush, and Chris Christie combined,” Robinson noted, “and he has more trips to Iowa already scheduled.”

To some Iowa Republicans, Trump’s hiring of the respected veteran GOP operative Chuck Laudner — last seen guiding Rick Santorum to a hard-won caucus victory in 2012 — is a sign Trump is serious about the possibility of running for president. Laudner has, in turn, hired three staff members — at this stage in Iowa, that’s a fairly substantial campaign. Trump is running a smart operation, Robinson notes, and seeing encouraging early signs:

In a recent conversation, Laudner gave the practical, insider’s view of what Robinson observed. “We signed up more people in Waverly last week than the rest of the candidates combined will see when they come to Bremer County,” Laudner told me. “When Huckabee and Santorum come to the Pizza Ranch, they’re going to get 25 to 30 people total. We spoke to 800 and got great media and signed up a ton of people.”

Of course some of those people were drawn by Trump’s celebrity. But once they were in the hall, it was the campaign’s job to turn them into voters. That’s why Trump hired Laudner. And Trump has hired experienced campaign workers in other early states, as well.

The bottom line is, by the various measurements journalists use to evaluate campaigns — crowds, staff, money, candidate time on the ground — if the Trump campaign were being conducted by anyone else, journalists would take it quite seriously.

But virtually no one does. It’s probably fair to say that not a single national political reporter or analyst in Washington, New York, or anywhere else thinks Trump is a serious candidate. To make things worse, and make himself seem less serious, Trump — or whoever runs his Twitter account — has responded to he’s-not-serious dismissals by trying to provoke crude flame wars with journalists on social media. For example, when “Meet the Press” moderator Chuck Todd said, “Nobody’s going to mistake Donald Trump for a presidential candidate, I don’t think, other than Donald Trump,” Trump responded, via Twitter, with: “So many people have told me I should host Meet the Press and replace the moron who is on now. Just too busy, especially next 10 years!” Trump’s Twitter attacks on the National Review’s Jonah Goldberg and the Weekly Standard’s Stephen Hayes — who, admittedly, had called Trump a “bane of humanity” and “clown,” respectively — were astonishingly juvenile.

Trump feeds the I’m-not-serious image further with some of his high-profile performances. Take for example, his apparently stream-of-consciousness talk Saturday at the Freedom Summit in South Carolina. Trump began by accusing Scott Walker of stealing his — Trump’s — theme of Making America Great Again; apparently Trump wants to copyright that fairly common political sentiment. Trump also accused Mike Huckabee of stealing his idea not to cut Social Security. “They copy my themes all the time!” he complained.

Maybe Trump was joking. Maybe not. In any event, that was just the introduction to a big helping of Trump’s trademark bluster. “I would be the greatest jobs president ever, in my opinion,” Trump proclaimed. “But I really think I’d be even better at security.” If he chooses to run, Trump said, “We’re going to do something, I think, that’s going to be very earth shattering.”

On the other hand, amid all the showmanship, Trump went on to cover a number of issues — Iran, China, trade, national security, federal spending, global warming — in serious, albeit highly informal, ways that could connect with a substantial number of Republicans. By the end, Trump had delivered a lot of showbiz and a bit of substance in a mix that had the crowd on its feet.

What to make of it all? Here’s the important thing to remember about Trump, or any other political candidate, for that matter: Maybe you think he’s a clown. But some voters, perhaps a significant number of voters, take him seriously. They’re not dumb. So the question is, what concern of those voters, what need, is being addressed by Donald Trump?

For Trump, the key was at the very beginning of his South Carolina speech. “Sadly, politicians are all talk and no action,” Trump told the crowd. “They’re not going to get you to the promised land, that I can tell you.” Although Trump is appearing at Republican events, and pursuing, after a fashion, the GOP nomination, he’s really running against the politics, and the politicians, of both parties. He’s presenting himself as the man who gets things done, party be damned — and the man who is so rich he won’t be beholden to any party boss or fat cat donor.

“One thing that sums it up for me is Trump is about the closest thing to a third-party candidate without having to leave the party,” said Laudner. “He gets the I’ve-had-it-up-to-my-eyeballs vote. We’re catching a lot of those people who are just fed up with both parties.”

And that is pretty much the answer: Donald Trump is the third party candidate running for the Republican nomination. It’s been clear for quite a while that some conservative voters are so disgusted with the GOP that they would entertain the notion of a third party. If he pursues a race seriously, Trump could win the support of those I’ve-had-it-up-to-my-eyeballs voters. Their concerns aren’t a joke. If Trump doesn’t address them, somebody else will.