A confluence of developments led to Bud Cummins’ chairmanship of Donald Trump’s campaign in Arkansas.
For one thing, Cummins’ daughter with a marketing degree went to New York looking for work, not a political career, and landed a job early with the Trump campaign.
For another, Cummins was a good friend of a fellow former U.S. attorney, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, and, as a supporter of Christie’s bid for the Republican presidential nomination, joined Christie in switching allegiance to Trump after Christie bowed out.
Christie now heads Trump’s transition team in case he wins. Hillary has one, too. The government appropriates money for these purposes and insists that potentially incoming presidents get ready. And Christie has put Cummins on that team.
Third, but not least: Cummins, now a private practicing lawyer in Little Rock, has soured over the years on politics as usual. He seems to get a kick out of the fact that Trump has called the media’s “bluff.”
By “bluff,” he means that, for decades, the political media have presumed to set the rules of political candidacy — that there are certain things you say and don’t say, and certain things you reveal, such as your income-tax returns. But it turns out the media had no enforcement mechanism in the event a candidate, like Trump, chose not to play by those rules.
Cummins’ favorite example is what happened to him in 1996. As the Republican nominee for an open congressional seat from the 2nd District, he lost a close race to Vic Snyder. Late in the campaign he got unfavorable media attention for having called Snyder a liberal and elaborated that liberalism led to socialism, which led to communism.
Cummins apologized for saying such a thing — for implying that Snyder was a near-commie — and accepted that he’d blundered. He says now that he should have just gone on about his business— as Trump goes on about his after a fairly regular utterance that sets off a firestorm in the media.
In an interview Monday, Cummins told me the media mainstream is in the tank for Hillary Clinton. He complained of a cycle: Trump says something “technically inaccurate,” and reporters spend days obsessing on it rather than covering important issues or giving equal treatment to Clinton’s controversies, such as emails or matters affecting the Clinton Foundation during her service as secretary of state.
It’s all a matter of perspective, of course, not to mention the predictable whining of all campaigns. Clinton defenders can tell you with equal or greater credibility that reporters have obsessed unfairly for years on her emails and the Clinton Foundation.
The latest email controversy has mainly to do with communications between Hillary’s aides at the State Department and foundation officials, not Hillary herself. Her main input is to ask her aides to print out those long emails because she doesn’t like to read extended digital formulations. That’s kind of ironic.
And “technically inaccurate” seems a sanitized phrase for such Trumpisms as that John McCain was no war hero, that “Second Amendment people” might be able to do something if Clinton got elected to make judicial appointments, and that President Barack Obama and Clinton “founded ISIS.”
Cummins admitted that part of the cycle he cites as unfair to Trump is the result of Trump’s “teeing it up” for the media with ill-advised extemporaneous asides reflecting, as Cummins adjudges, that he is not a trained and sterilized politician, but a man who talks in his campaign oratory much the way guys talk at a duck club.
The controversy about Trump’s refusal to release his income-tax returns — though presidential candidates have done that routinely for four decades — is a precise example of Cummins’ point.
He said no law requires the release of income-tax returns. It was a media “bluff” all along, in his view. The law requires certain financial disclosures, and the press ought to cover those, he said. Income-tax returns serve more as a “distraction” than a matter of transparent value, he said.
Oh, and Cummins adds that reporters ought to spend as much time railing against Clinton for not ever having a news conference.
The law doesn’t require news conferences, either.
So let’s negotiate a deal. By synchronization, Hillary would step out and hold a news conference as Trump hands over 10 years of income-tax returns to The New York Times.
We’ll see which development generates more news coverage, and assess the fairness thereof.
John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers’ Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at [email protected]. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.