Once more with feeling

Donald Trump is essentially a scam artist, self-confessed.

Leading Republicans are coalescing on Trump's nomination for president anyway. They want to win the two other branches of government. That's the tradeoff.

Republicans want to hold Congress by not burdening their House and Senate candidates with a presidential nominee so marginalized that he might bring down the entire party. Thus the need to try to normalize the abnormal.

In Arizona, for example, U.S. Sen. John McCain finds himself dependent for re-election this fall on a man who disparaged his war-prisoner heroism. Allegiance to Trump is how McCain appeals to the anti-immigrant conservative base in his state. But he also needs for Trump to be credible enough that decisive independents won't look askance at any member of a party that would nominate him.

The presidential race also is about the U.S. Supreme Court and all that it might decide over the next four years--on abortion, religious freedom versus gay and transgender rights, the power of government and, still, whether Obamacare can be chopped away by case law.

One justice's seat--the decisive one--hinges on the presidential race's outcome. One or two other vacancies easily could arise in the next presidential term.

Our culture could well be dictated for a generation through the Supreme Court by the outcome of this presidential election.

For that, Republicans are preparing to sacrifice the presidency--more specifically a competent and responsible presidency, meaning a qualified, steady and reliable hand at the helm of the world's most powerful office.

It's a high price to pay--attaching a nuclear weapon to a loose cannon so that you can keep gays and women down and deny people health insurance.


So about that reference to Trump as a self-confessed scam artist ... Consider so-called Trump University, now the subject of a class-action lawsuit alleging high-pressure sales tactics, deceptive marketing and low-value instruction.

Promotions for the defunct enterprise asserted Trump's "sales wisdom," which went as follows: "When you talk to customers, it usually works best if the subject is problems ... You don't sell products, benefits or solutions. You sell feelings ... Don't ask what your customers think about what you've told them. Ask them how they feel about it."

More reputable sales techniques encompass a role for emotion. But they don't openly call for exploiting it through purposeful disregard for the product or its value.

What's most significant is that the cynical principle of Trump University matches precisely the very essence of Trump's presidential campaign.

He has gone around the country telling customers that there is a problem, which is that America has gone to hell. Then he has offered not a solution, but a feeling. He says he will make America great again.

Consider as well that Trump boycotted a Fox News debate in January, exploited veterans' groups by scheduling a fundraiser for them opposite the debate, crowed at that event that he'd raised $6 million, including a million from himself, and then didn't cut checks distributing most of that $6 million until May 24.

That so happened to be the day the Washington Post published an article reporting that, in four months, Trump hadn't distributed much of the ballyhooed manna.

He'd sold a feeling--one of regard for veterans. He'd delayed a product until the newspaper caught him not yet delivering one.

Last week Hillary Clinton made probably the most effective speech of her life, eviscerating Trump with a powerfully detailed barrage against his unsuitable, indeed frightful, temperament.

The speech's theme: Imagine the finger of the mad and vindictive tweeter on the nuclear button.

I'd add: Imagine the country as Trump University Writ Large. Imagine waking up in January with a four-year supply of snake oil.

Trump makes a mockery of our politics. The problem with stating that evident truth is that Trump supporters inevitably reply that the mockery of our politics was made long ago by politicians-as-usual.

That one kind of mockery justifies an even worse kind of mockery--that is an attitude born of a Trump University seminar, not of thinking.

Clinton, whatever else her failings, does not make a mockery of our politics. She has an adult history of trying to make conventional politics work.

That front-page article Sunday, drawn from her late friend Diane Blair's papers, revealed a woman who wanted to be stuck in a room working not on feelings, but on policy and solutions.

Clinton also has an adult history of hits and misses, of policy command and political blunder.

We could frame the presidential choice as a maker of mistakes versus a maker of a mockery.

We all make mistakes. But no one at the American presidential level has ever before made quite such a spectacle of a mockery.

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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.

Editorial on 06/07/2016

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