Passing Peak Trump?

TubbaBlubba said:
I tend to agree with Nate Silver - it wasn't so much that Trump was underestimated, it was that everybody assumed that the GOP would unite against him. It felt pretty obvious that Trump was going to bully someone like Jeb! into nonexistence, but if e.g. Christie, who's a bit of a bulldog, had seriously gone after Trump and the GOP-friendly media had taken him up on it, that could've done serious damage.
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Ezra Klein disagrees: The GOP did unite against Trump. They just couldn't stop him.

http://www.vox.com/2016/2/24/11103704/the-republican-party-is-broken

An excerpt:
But the Republican Party did try to stop Trump. It just failed. And until the nature of that failure is appreciated, the strength of Trump's candidacy is going to be underestimated.

The Republican assault on Donald Trump was vast

The GOP didn't, in political science parlance, "decide" on a single champion — no one candidate received the bulk of official endorsements before Iowa. But parties do more than decide; they also veto. And the Republican Party did try to veto Trump — as did everyone else. Trump has come under a coordinated assault from the Republican Party, the Democratic Party, and the media that is unlike anything in my lifetime.

The first Republican debate featured Fox News — arguably the single most powerful actor in the modern Republican Party — trying to cut Trump's candidacy to shreds. The harsh questioning, which touched on everything from his past heterodoxies to his friendship with Hillary Clinton to his misogyny, kicked off a feud between Fox News and Trump that continues to this day.

The National Review, which acts as the official magazine of American conservatism, pulled contributors from every wing of the movement to write a Stop Trump issue. The festival of contributions — which included everyone from Glenn Beck to Erick Erickson to Bill Kristol — were clustered under the headline "Conservatives Against Trump." The magazine's own editorial was titled "Against Trump," and it began by calling Trump "a philosophically unmoored political opportunist who would trash the broad conservative ideological consensus within the GOP in favor of a free-floating populism with strong-man overtones."
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It's probably best to see Trump's success as similar to that of Nigel Farage's from UKIP, and maybe that of Jeremy Corbyn from Labour.

What Trump's opponents and many in the media never understood, and still do not, is that most of their attacks only increase Trump's reputation and popularity as being an outsider of the despised party mainstream.

Politicians and many in the media used to get very excited every time they found out that maybe Farage had been using EU funds, or had a foreign name and a foreign wife, and had said un-PC things. Similarly, the Labour mainstream and writers in the broadsheets kept trying to tell party members that Corbyn was mad, but people ended up put off by the obvious smear tactics and frankly did not care about the supposed "gaffes" of these outsiders. And the reason why is that they largely agreed with these "gaffes".

Even though Trump went off on the Bushes lying about the Iraq War, nobody who supports him will care if Trump or they themselves supported the Iraq War at the time. They will consider it irrelevant. Similarly, they will almost certainly not care if Rubio gets some blows in at a debate and looks pleased with himself. Trump fans will probably just brush it off as further evidence that everyone's against Trump because of his "awesomeness" and "straight-talking".

It doesn't matter that he has no policies.
 
I think the mistake a lot of us made was that we had no idea the GOP "Establishement" would be so inept in stopping Trump.
 
dudalb said:
I think the mistake a lot of us made was that we had no idea the GOP "Establishement" would be so inept in stopping Trump.
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Particularly the odds-on favorite, Jeb Bush. I seem to recall he was thought to be a shoe-in. Especially by himself. He and the establishment really had no idea how toxic the Bush name is.
 
dudalb said:
I think the mistake a lot of us made was that we had no idea the GOP "Establishement" would be so inept in stopping Trump.
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I think many of us have erred in thinking the GOP was in control of the GOP, but now it looks like everybody from the candidates to Mitch McConnell was waiting for someone else to be the grownup in the room.
 
angrysoba said:
It's probably best to see Trump's success as similar to that of Nigel Farage's from UKIP, and maybe that of Jeremy Corbyn from Labour.

What Trump's opponents and many in the media never understood, and still do not, is that most of their attacks only increase Trump's reputation and popularity as being an outsider of the despised party mainstream.

Politicians and many in the media used to get very excited every time they found out that maybe Farage had been using EU funds, or had a foreign name and a foreign wife, and had said un-PC things. Similarly, the Labour mainstream and writers in the broadsheets kept trying to tell party members that Corbyn was mad, but people ended up put off by the obvious smear tactics and frankly did not care about the supposed "gaffes" of these outsiders. And the reason why is that they largely agreed with these "gaffes".

Even though Trump went off on the Bushes lying about the Iraq War, nobody who supports him will care if Trump or they themselves supported the Iraq War at the time. They will consider it irrelevant. Similarly, they will almost certainly not care if Rubio gets some blows in at a debate and looks pleased with himself. Trump fans will probably just brush it off as further evidence that everyone's against Trump because of his "awesomeness" and "straight-talking".

It doesn't matter that he has no policies.
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SOme truth in that so far, but when it moves to the general election things become different.
 
I have the feeling that we have passed peak Trump, and that Trump will lose popularity among some (but not all) of his followers. This is my guess.

Of course, I could be wrong,
 
Maya22 said:
I have the feeling that we have passed peak Trump, and that Trump will lose popularity among some (but not all) of his followers. This is my guess.

Of course, I could be wrong,
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Agreed. This reflects in national polling. He's more and more unhinged and I don't think it's working anymore. Not to say it will prevent him from the nomination at this stage though.
 
varwoche said:
Agreed. This reflects in national polling. He's more and more unhinged and I don't think it's working anymore. Not to say it will prevent him from the nomination at this stage though.
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I think he's just in a lull.
 
Maya22 said:
I have the feeling that we have passed peak Trump, and that Trump will lose popularity among some (but not all) of his followers. This is my guess.

Of course, I could be wrong,
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It is possible that he is losing his supporters, yes, and that is because he may have shot himself in the foot. From a Washington Post newsletter:

Donald Trump is losing Ann Coulter. And he’s almost certain to lose the Wisconsin primary next week.

Coulter became rich by courting controversy, being intentionally provocative and insensitive to build a fan base on the far right. She’s been one of The Donald’s staunchest defenders for months. But even Coulter couldn’t bite her tongue after the Republican front-runner retweeted an unflattering picture of Heidi Cruz juxtaposed against one of his own model-turned-trophy wife.

“I’m a little testy with our man right now,” Coulter told Breitbart’s Milo Yiannopoulos in a podcast that posted earlier this week. “Our candidate is mental. Do you realize our candidate is mental? It’s like constantly having to bail out your 16-year-old son from prison!”

“Everything else I could defend,” she added. “He has been more a victim than victimizer. … This is the worst thing he’s done.”
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Ann Coulter and Milo Yanniapolous were two of the biggest purchasers/peddlers of the Trump-as-victim narrative, but even they appear less able to spin some of his recent behaviour in those terms.

Of course, this might be them just letting off steam with each other and it may not matter in the end, but I think only Trump can put off his supporters.
 
angrysoba said:
It is possible that he is losing his supporters, yes, and that is because he may have shot himself in the foot. From a Washington Post newsletter:



Ann Coulter and Milo Yanniapolous were two of the biggest purchasers/peddlers of the Trump-as-victim narrative, but even they appear less able to spin some of his recent behaviour in those terms.

Of course, this might be them just letting off steam with each other and it may not matter in the end, but I think only Trump can put off his supporters.
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Looking at her Twitter account now, she seems to be supporting Trump as much as ever before.
 
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