Ned Gardner: Trump’s sales strategy
As a Democrat, I took great pleasure in Republican conservative intellectual George Will’s discomfiture regarding The Donald in his Dec. 26 column “A conservative party jeopardized by Trump.”
The party elite have always parlayed emotional issues into votes cast by citizens whose own economic interests are then ignored by Republican office-holders beholden to moneyed interests. But Trump has bypassed the elite, employing an emotionally blatant populism to “steal” the Republican base.
Will clings to hope that reason may yet derail Trump’s run to the nomination. It won’t. Trump is an astute businessman, in addition to being the troubling full-blown narcissist Will described.
When Trump championed the birther movement in 2011 while suggesting he might be running for president in 2012, he was actually laying groundwork for 2016 – he was securing the future votes of a very sizable portion of the Republican base that insists Obama is a Kenyan Muslim. These folks were then and perpetually remain furious. And they will vote in Republican primaries for their champion, Donald Trump.
Trump no more believes in birtherism than he believes we never landed on the moon. Birtherism was his sales strategy. And the profits are now rolling in without the need for him to even mention the subject. Impressive.
Ned Gardner
Apex
This story was originally published January 3, 2016 at 12:56 PM with the headline "Ned Gardner: Trump’s sales strategy."