http://linkis.com/heatst.com/politics/djabTRick Wilson: The Trump Scampaign’s Only Chance Now Is If Hillary Is Mauled by a BearBy Rick Wilson | 9:48 pm, June 24, 2016
The revelations in the May FEC report that Donald Trump’s campaign is broke put the lie to the assertion that he can afford to self-fund and that he doesn’t require the trappings of a modern campaign. Trump proclaimed dozens of times in the primaries that he was funding his own campaign, and boasted of his absurd wealth. We called it on these pages at the end of May. As we confirmed this week, Trump can’t even afford the cheap seats in the billion-dollar ballgame of this election.
Hillary Clinton has been on the air for several weeks in swing states, with a devastating ad series aimed straight at the soft underbelly of Trump’s support; Republicans who don’t subsist on a fad diet of lead paint chips, cheap plastic-bottle vodka and talk-radio rage. She’s raising money at a furious pace, and the Democratic Party is swiftly leaving their flirtation with Red Bernie behind.
As Clinton continues to open up leads in key swing states like Florida and Virginia and show surprising strength in Republican strongholds like Utah, the stink coming off his newly manager-less campaign is increasingly pungent. For months, Trump’s mojo in the primaries defied logic, sense and the rules of politics, but as we’ve turned toward the general election, the inexorable physics of political reality are in effect. The true-believers may be ready for their track suits, Kool Aid and the arrival of Comet Trump, but the rest of the GOP is growing restive.
The persistence of Never Trump (“Damn those meddling kids and their talking dog!”) seems to shock the Trump fan base, but it shouldn’t. We know something the Trump fans vehemently deny; roughly 50% of the Republican Party doesn’t want Trump as the nominee, and that number will grow as three constants of the campaign become clear:
First, Trump will never get better at being a candidate. He’ll never change. He’ll never be Presidential. His lurid, random drunk-uncle crazytalk won’t stop. He still trusts his own political instincts, which were perfectly tuned to rev up a nativist, low-information 30-ish percent of the GOP base, but are ludicrously off-target in the general election. He’ll never pivot, because he can’t.
He’s a clown with a specific act, a Borscht Belt comic giggling at his own take-my-wife-please jokes. Among his followers, dreams of the Wall and mass deportations (of Mexicans, Muslims and enemies of the Trump State like your author) and the rest of the febrile nationalist fantasies Trump’s media enablers stoke in his horde may still play, but they are poison to practically everyone else.
Second, Trump is now and will remain broke, particularly relative to Clinton. For all his bluster, campaign finance expert and superlawyer Charlie Spies notes that Trump has to cut a check of between $100 and $200 million to become even vaguely credible with deeply skeptical donors. Absent that, Hillary Clinton will continue raising and spending money in swing states, opening up wider and wider leads, making it harder and harder for Trump to convince even the most credulous GOP money people to take the bait.
Another reason donors are going to stay far back from the blast radius: Trump’s FEC report shows that fully 20% of his campaign spending goes to members of his family or businesses he owns, not at a cost to him, but a profit. After an FEC report that looks like it could be an exhibit in a RICO case, the idea of subsidizing Trump’s campaign and his various enterprises is repellent to donors. He spent more money buying hats for resale than he spent on polling. He spent more money on his private jet than he did for field operations.
Trump’s scampaign even paid him $423,000 to use Mar a Lago for campaign events in May. For that money, Trump could have bought two days of TV advertising in Florida, or a week of digital ads. Many donors are actual billionaires with a built-in resistance to sucker bets and to throwing good money after bad. They can smell his growing desperation, and many of them have likely determined that unless he’s ready to sell a marquee property, he’s at the ragged edges of his credit lines.
Finally, reality is setting in for everyone else in the Republican universe. His campaign predicate of not needing a campaign – or that he could outsource it to the RNC – was always flimsy, and as Clinton’s operation moves numbers and organizes, Trump will try to paper over his failure to build a real campaign by rushing for the 437th time for into Sean Hannity’s soft embrace while he bellows about deporting Muslims. As Trump has been learning in the last month, earned media is necessary but not necessarily sufficient.
These pressures of Trump’s collapse are rising on downballot candidates burdened by Trump. They know he’s nothing but downside. They know that neither Trump nor the RNC can pay for a true national operation to defeat Hillary as long as he sabotages ever constructive action and flails wildly at every pitch. There is no air cover. There is no cavalry. No one is coming to their rescue.
The National Republican Senatorial Committee knows this. The National Republican Congressional Committee knows it. Governors in the states and state party officials know it. Republican candidates from Senator to Mosquito Control Board (yes, that’s a real thing) know it.
Some candidates are playing the “I’m supporting the nominee, what was his name again?” game, but more are joining the Never Trump movement every day. The lickspittle behavior of the RNC has convinced many elected officials that the national committee isn’t serious about correcting or managing Trump, and they’re watching the brewing delegate revolt carefully, waiting for the moment they can pull the eject handle and escape.
Donald Trump’s eager Vichy collaborators at the RNC are playing the “he’s our nominee and can do no wrong” act to the hilt, the pain behind their eyes mediated by some secret combination of day-drinking, Xanax and magical thinking. They keep talking and acting as if Trump is a normal candidate and that Hillary is bad enough to scare the party in to line, but their thousand-yard stares prove it’s not working.
Trump’s main hope now is that Hillary Clinton will be indicted, mauled by a bear or struck by a meteor. Praying for miracles isn’t a campaign strategy; it’s political suicide. Sadly for the GOP, Trump is dragging too many over the cliff with him.
