Bloomberg Politics assembled a dozen admitted Donald Trump supporters in New Hampshire last week for a focus group discussion.
The topic: Why in the world are you people for that guy?
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Written accounts of what the participants said provided this enlightenment: If you are utterly disdainful of contemporary American politics and politicians, finding it and them to be self-preserving and self-enriching and of no benefit or relevance to you, then you will tend to take a shine to a seemingly self-made maverick from outside the political establishment who defies all the rules of that which you disdain, and who does so with arrogance and malevolence and dripping contempt of his own.
Most importantly, you won’t apply to him the rules of politics that define and constrain those you disdain.
Thus he becomes a monster that can’t be destroyed, one that, in fact, gets stronger by attempts to destroy him.
For example: The New Hampshire focus-group participants were talking about Trump’s saying that he preferred war heroes who, unlike John McCain, didn’t get captured.
Those of us mired in the conventional rules of politics believed at the time—eight whole days ago—that this utterance from a draft-avoider would ruin Trump. But it didn’t, though it would have ruined just about anyone else.
One man in the focus group said it bothered him that Trump was disrespectful to prisoners of war, but then added that, actually, you know, it’s true that McCain was not strictly a war hero in the sense of traditional battlefield feat.
Someone else spoke up to say that, even if Trump committed an egregious offense in his comment about McCain, she admired that he didn’t back down from it in the way of politicians-as-usual.
Other politicians recoil from the commission of a so-called gaffe, which is really nothing more than a lapse into the kind of candor common to honest, decent people who say what they think without regard for how it’s going to be received.
So Trump gets away with an outrageous insult to McCain’s suffering as a war prisoner because … well, because he said what he was thinking, and he said it with caution tossed to the wind, and he didn’t take it back, and that’s what we like. Otherwise all we get are safely calculated, poll-tested remarks and apologies and retreats and doublespeak from politicians who say essentially nothing to us and do absolutely nothing for us.
At least that’s what the New Hampshire focus group seemed to be saying anyway.
One woman in the focus group has been ridiculed for saying Trump was just like her.
He isn’t remotely, of course.
But—and pay close attention here—she said all the candidates are much richer than she, thus out of touch with her, but that most of them, unlike Trump, got that way during careers in politics.
So now 20 percent to 25 percent of Republican primary poll respondents have vaulted Trump into a steady lead, albeit one surely at its pinnacle.
The issue for Republicans is not about Trump’s poll numbers growing. It’s about what to do with that 20 to 25 percent, which makes something of a mockery of the otherwise anemic field.
Last week establishment columnist George Will was predicting that a dire fate awaits Trump when voters get a load of his background—of his having given money to liberal Democrats and his having used eminent domain to take others’ private property for his own private enrichment.
Super-PAC money from the Koch brothers, spent in support of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, will seek to impose that fate.
So let me take a stab at predicting what those New Hampshire focus-group participants and the 20 to 25 percent of Republican primary poll respondents will say to all that. It’s that a New York businessman has to cover his political bases with liberals and that Trump was merely using tools legally at his disposal to build a successful business.
It’s that these are nothing more than the unimaginatively desperate tactics of politicians-as-usual on a man with enough money and nerve to call them out.
Trump won’t be president any time soon. Polls of the general electorate show that nearly 60 percent hold an understandably negative opinion of him.
But as to the question of how his Republican rivals can separate Trump from that 20 to 25 percent—that’s a question with an ever-more-elusive answer.
Trump needs to implode, perhaps in a forthcoming debate. But, imploded or not, it may be that the same 20 to 25 percent of Republican primary voters will love him and the same 60 percent of the general population won’t.
Those in the 20 to 25 percent may not actually want him to be president. But they really get a kick out of the way he messes with the ruling political pansies.
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John Brummett’s column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at [email protected]. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.