Trump Gets Ready to Be a Bad Loser
http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/trump-gets-ready-to-be-a-bad-loser
In a sense, the strategic choice before Trump—double down on the white working class or reach out to white-collar whites—mirrored the differing approaches of the two top advisers who took over the campaign in August. Kellyanne Conway, the campaign manager, had a history of sanding the rough edges off of Republican men in order to appeal to moderate women. By contrast, Steve Bannon, the new C.E.O. of Trump’s campaign, has spent the last few years as an architect of the neo-white nationalist movement that is toxic to the white-collar Republicans who have fled from Trump. For several weeks, it seemed that the Conway view of the campaign had prevailed. Trump was more scripted through late August and September. He talked about outreach to minorities, which was not so much about actually winning minority votes as it was about signalling to college-educated whites that Trump wasn’t a racist. He detailed a child-care tax deduction, which, despite its flaws as a coherent policy, was in synch with the strategic direction that Conway had pushed.
The wheels of this strategy came flying off in three dramatic episodes: Trump’s meltdown in the first debate, when he was unable to mount a sustained argument either for his candidacy or against Clinton’s; the release of the audio and video of Trump bragging about sexually assaulting women; and the subsequent effective abandonment of Trump by Party leaders. (A quarter of Republican governors, senators, and Congress members have now said that they will not support Trump.)
“It is so nice that the shackles have been taken off me and I can now fight for America the way I want to,” Trump tweeted on Tuesday morning, declaring an official end to the Conway experiment—and to any discernible plan to win the election. Trump is now attacking Republican leaders who allegedly betrayed him as much as he’s attacking Clinton. Perhaps the temper tantrum will pass and Trump will refocus his campaign in the final days on issues that have some strategic value to him. But it’s more likely that Trump knows he can’t win and that he has decided that the last stretch of his campaign should be used to set the stage for the aftermath of his loss. In this scenario, what’s crucial for Trump is to be able to convince his hard-core supporters that he—and they—didn’t lose, but that the dreaded Republican establishment sabotaged the Trump campaign in the final weeks. This strategy is in keeping with the way Trump has always spun his greatest defeats, from his failures in Atlantic City to his loss in the Iowa caucuses. He either denies that he failed or he argues that he was cheated.
Trump is either victorious or victimized, but never a loser. This week marked the end of Trump trying to actually win, and the beginning of him plotting to explain why the election was stolen.
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