Donald Trump is threatening once again to run for president. The famed business mogul recently said that he will announce his presidential plans in June, and that they will “surprise a lot of people.”
Trump has dropped hints on Twitter and in interviews with various media outlets. He has hired staff and visited key primary states. That said, he’s seemingly been flirting with running for president off and on since about 1999. Many pundits and voters no longer take him seriously.
Whether or not Trump ultimately runs, he is likely to play a prominent role in 2016. That’s bad news for Republicans. The billionaire real estate developer with the extravagant lifestyle and blunt manner personifies much of what’s wrong with the modern Right. His association with the GOP, if it has any effect, can only hurt it with the very voters it needs to win over.
Incredibly, some Republicans can’t seem to get enough of Trump. His annual appearance at the Conservative Political Action Conference is now an embarrassing ritual. He campaigned for various Republican candidates ahead of the mid-term elections, both in person and via robocalls. Mitt Romney appeared with him in February 2012 to accept his endorsement, less than a year after Trump’s embarrassing crusade for President Obama’s birth certificate had ended.
Even now, hardly a week goes by without Trump headlining one conservative gathering or another. Just last month, he won a “Statesman of the Year” award from the local Republican Party in Sarasota, Florida.
And to a disturbingly large number of conservative voters, Trump seems like a plausible president. He has topped several early polls for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination. When he tells conservative audiences that he might run for president, they often respond with wild applause, even if the conservative media do not. This year, he’s polling better than sitting state and federal lawmakers in some early primary polls. In an April Monmouth University poll, Trump topped Marco Rubio, Rand Paul, Rick Perry and Chris Christie.
There are three main reasons why so many conservatives revere Trump. First, there’s Trump’s contempt for Barack Obama, which goes beyond his policies to his person. He routinely questions Obama’s legitimacy (even after the birth certificate controversy), his intelligence, (calling him a “clown” who “doesn’t have a clue”) and his manliness, calling him a “weak president who kisses everybody’s ass” and even mocks the way he walks as “inelegant and un-presidential.”
Trump is saying things that some conservatives say privately, in a joking manner, but would never say publicly — as the sharpest critics of all presidents are wont to do. But Trump just lets it all hang out, and some star-struck conservatives, over-eager to have their worldview validated by celebrities, eat it up. Conservatives should have learned to avoid such star-chasing after aging rocker Ted Nugent’s cringe-inducing behavior last year. But they didn’t learn — days after Nugent called the president a “subhuman mongrel,” he was seen campaigning with a Republican gubernatorial candidate.
Mitt Romney lost the 2012 presidential election in part because working-class voters couldn’t relate to him and felt he didn’t understand their problems. Trump shares that problem, but in spades. Some conservatives may admire his success, but few Americans will be able to relate to a man who inherited $30 million dollars from his father and arrogantly broadcasts his wealth in a way that essentially says “I’m better than you because I’m richer than you. And by the way, you’re fired!”
A 2011 Quinnipiac University poll found that 58 percent of respondents said they would “never” vote for Trump for president. And a 2013 Public Policy Polling survey found that Trump was only two percentage points more popular than the notoriously despised U.S. Congress, which, according to the poll, made him less popular than colonoscopies, traffic jams and cockroaches.
This shouldn’t be surprising. The very things that make Trump popular with some conservatives — the unhinged Obama-bashing, the celebrity, the ostentatious wealth — make him suspicious for most voters.
Trump often says that, under Obama, “the U.S. is becoming the laughing stock of the world,” and that foreign countries “have no respect for our leader.” It is much less of an exaggeration to suggest that the Republican Party will become a laughing stock if it continues to hold up Trump as one of its leaders. And no one can doubt that America would be even less respected around the world than it is now in the highly unlikely event of a Trump presidency.
Daniel Allott is the Washington Examiner’s Deputy Commentary Editor
