“The challenge for Donald Trump is that for the last 50 years, Americans have not voted for someone who they didn’t like more than the others,” said pollster Frank Luntz. Unless Trump becomes more likable in a hurry, that pattern will continue for four more years. Trump will lose the presidency.
Trump, Luntz told Fox News, is “selling strength. He’s selling determination. He’s selling passion. He’s selling intensity, which is important. But Joe Biden is selling likability, and … likability does sell in American politics.”
Luntz was being nicer to the president than he deserved. Trump spends much of his time counterpunching anyone who criticizes him, picking fights with lesser figures, insulting allies, calling people dumb, generally making himself difficult to deal with, and causing anyone who leaves his administration to depart on bad terms.
The amazing thing is that millions of people who loathe Trump are planning to vote for his reelection on Nov. 3. They believe Democrats would be worse for the country than Mayor Bill de Blasio has been for New York. And they make a pretty good case.
But I suspect there are too few of such people at the moment, millions too few, for Trump to win. True, he defeated Hillary Clinton in 2016 by nullifying the popular vote with an Electoral College majority. Repeating that miracle is unlikely. And Biden is a superior opponent to Clinton.
Trump has been successful enough as president to be reelected. He surprised conservatives by becoming one of them. But the dislike of him personally is too widespread for a routine reelection to happen, as it did for Presidents George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama.
Likability may be Trump’s only solution. It’s doable. It’s not brain surgery. Many politicians are skilled at being likable. And It’s not as if Trump doesn’t have a likable side. I’ve talked to people who’ve met with him privately and came away liking him. I spent a friendly hour with him in 2015.
Trump could benefit from consulting Jon Meacham’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biography Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power. Jefferson is a model of a partisan politician with strong ideas who succeeded in getting along with everyone, including foes.
The Jefferson style was “smooth rather than rough, polite rather than confrontational,” Meacham writes. “He was a warrior for the causes in which he believed, but he conducted his battles at a remove, tending to use friends and allies to write and publish and promulgate the messages he thought crucial to the public debate.”
It’s difficult to imagine Trump leaving the fighting to others. Jefferson’s “calculated decision” to do so “was based on his experience of men and of politics that direct conflict was unproductive and ineffective,” Meacham writes.
Trump’s experience in New York real estate and as a TV personality didn’t teach him to step back rather than dominate every moment, whether major or trivial. He’s paying a price for that lesson today.
President Ronald Reagan was almost as different from Trump as Jefferson was. Reagan had the advantage of not having to fake being likable. He kept his public appearances to a minimum. This elevated him.
Reagan played hard-to-get and was rewarded for it. In the rankings of presidents since Franklin D. Roosevelt, he is at the top or nearby. Trump is hard to avoid, and he’s at the bottom. Reagan made people eager to see more of him. With Trump, they’d be happy with less.
The debates, assuming they happen, are an opportunity for Trump to change his style. But he may be tempted not to and instead pummel Biden for two hours in the expectation that he will collapse under the pressure.
But what if Biden doesn’t fall apart? What if Biden shows up with a clever strategy? With weeks to practice, Biden could surprise Trump, embarrass him, and be declared the winner.
In his debates with Clinton in 2016, Trump appeared not to have prepared anything new. He simply repeated what he’d been saying at rallies for months. Clinton won.
To prevail against Biden, it should be easy to fool him and the media. They see Trump as one-dimensional. What if he’s relaxed, clever, and humorous and refers to Biden without being mean or angry? That’s what likability would look like.
Fred Barnes is a Washington Examiner senior columnist.
