My Observation About Donald Trump

[Posted on Facebook. Posted here for archival purposes. Or something.]

Before I say it what I'm about to say, I'm going to freely admit that I have no hard evidence or documents or eyewitness testimony to back it up. It's just an observation. I haven't done any extensive research; I've just been sort of paying attention for the past year. Honestly, I don't think I'm being particularly astute with this observation; I feel like anyone else who has been sort of paying attention would come to the same conclusion. But no one else is talking about it; and it seems like something people would talk about, because it's pretty relevant to the election. Anyway, this is my observation:

Donald Trump never actually intended to be the Republican nominee for President.

I don't mean he went in as a serious candidate knowing the odds were stacked against him. I mean he got into the race COUNTING on the fact that the odds were stacked so much against him. He never planned to beat the odds.

Logic dictates there are two possibilities:

A. Trump got into the race as a serious candidate who planned to win, or at least compete to win.

B. Trump did NOT get into the race as a serious candidate. We can speculate on what his reasons were for getting in, but it was not to seriously compete for the nomination.

(Incidentally, getting into a Presidential race with no intent of winning is hardly unprecedented. The 2012 GOP field had plenty of candidates (Michelle Bachmann, Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich) whose primary purpose was to sell books and/or jack up their appearance fees.)

The reason I come to Conclusion B is simply that it makes a lot more sense than Conclusion A. Some examples are listed below.

-People who are serious candidates generally behave in certain ways. They put together a huge network of staff and campaign offices and donors; they carefully prepare their public remarks, trying not to offend anyone (anyone who might possibly vote for them, at least); they prepare in advance for interviews and debates; they make sure their personal finances are in order and publicly release their tax returns. That is not the way Donald Trump behaves.

-While Trump hasn't publicly addressed this himself, his son (allegedly) made overtures in May to an adviser of Gov. John Kasich, asking if Kasich was interested in being the most powerful VP in history, and saying that Trump's VP would be in charge of foreign and domestic policy. When the adviser asked what Trump would be in charge of, the son reportedly said, “Making America great again.” I don't know if this story is true or not, but I do know that being President involves a lot of hard work, and my sense is that Trump doesn't really like to do hard work. Other examples of hard work include studying up on foreign policy and debate prep, and Trump has no interest in those. The point is, being in charge of policy is pretty much the main reason to be President. You can have a specific policy agenda you want to advance (e.g. Bernie Sanders), or you can have an agenda that isn't very well-defined, but be really sure that you want to be one in charge of it (e.g. Hillary Clinton); but if you don't really care about an agenda or about being in charge, then what's the point of being President? Other than maybe people HAVE to stand up whenever you walk into the room—but honestly, Trump is rich enough that he can hire people to stand up when he walks in the room. Speaking of which…

-I don't think anyone will dispute that Donald Trump loves Donald Trump. But I think there's one thing he loves more than Donald Trump, and that's money. Lots and lots of money. He says he's worth upwards of $10 billion (though probably most of that is his perceived value of what the Trump brand name is worth.) Do you know what the annual salary of the President of the United States is? Four hundred thousand dollars ($400,000). If you put $10 billion in a savings account earning 1% interest, it would take you less than 2 days to earn $400,000. But the even bigger issue is that the federal government tends to be very skeptical about any OTHER money you might be earning while you're President. Like, ANY other money. Especially any sort of money that you might be making outside of your government salary that could possibly have been affected in any way by official actions you took as President. This is why, historically, Presidents put all their assets in a blind trust, where someone else controls how the money gets invested, and the President has no knowledge of it. When asked about the whole blind trust idea, Trump said he would give his kids full control of the Trump Organization. The problem there is that Trump already KNOWS what the Trump Organization is invested in, which means the only way it could be a truly “blind” trust is for his kids to sell off every single asset and then buy entirely new ones, without anyone finding out what those new assets were and reporting it in the financial section of the newspaper. There is NO WAY this wasn't always destined to be a HUGE financial conflict of interest if he became President. But it never occurred to him that it might be a problem. And the only way it wouldn't be a problem is if he never actually became President.

-Trump was clearly not prepared for the vetting that the media would give him. A serious candidate with a serious campaign manager would've hired someone to do their own opposition research on Trump from the start, so they would know exactly what they were facing, in terms of possible scandals. (I can only assume the researchers' conclusion would have been, “Um, are you SURE you want to run for President, Mr. Trump?”) At the beginning, Trump was viewed by everyone as a novelty, spouting off racist comments and generally giving reporters something to be amused about. As long as he wasn't a serious contender, no one bothered to vet him (which is exactly the way Trump wanted it.) But when his poll numbers went up, and he ultimately went on to win the nomination, reporters started seriously investigating him. And he had no answer to most of the stuff they found, except to lie about it. Which would be one thing if he could actually make up a GOOD lie, but instead he comes up with things like he can't release his tax return because he's being audited. (I'm not technically a tax lawyer, but I'm pretty sure the people auditing him already HAVE a copy of his tax return, so there's no way he's going to hurt his legal case by showing it to the rest of us.) It's like if you're 17 and your mom insists that you go out and get a summer job, so you go to the library and fill out an application and you put that you refuse to work mornings and you think books are stupid and also all Mexicans are rapists. You obviously don't WANT to actually get the job; you just want to be able to tell your mom you applied for something so she'll leave you alone. Except it turns out that all the other applicants were inexplicably worse than you somehow, so the head librarian starts checking in to your background and discovers that you have 3 overdue books, 2 unpaid fines, and last year you were banned from the premises for a month for using the library's internet to look at porn that was so obscene, it's not legally protected by the first amendment. And the librarian tells your mom all this when she calls her, because your mom was the only person you put down as a reference.

Pretty much everything about the Donald Trump campaign suggests that, at least at the beginning, it was never intended to be serious. When he got in, no one thought he had the slightest chance of winning. He got some support from anti-establishment voters, which normally would not be enough, but the GOP field this year was full of mediocre candidates who split enough votes with each other to let Trump sneak into the lead. If I remember correctly, his support never got much above 40% until the end, but there were enough other candidates who stayed in the race and split votes for long enough that Trump was able to get the nomination. There may have been some point along the way where he decided he actually did want to win; but it may just have been he passed a point of no return, where it was clear he was going to win, and there was no way for him to back out. I still don't think he wants to be President—as much of an ego boost and a legacy as it would be for him, it's a job that requires a lot of work, and he doesn't want to do the work. Right now, I think he's stuck—he doesn't particularly want to win the election, but he can't stand the idea of losing on the biggest stage in the world, with everyone watching. And it's certainly too late for him to admit the truth and back out now. I think his plan now—and we've already seen him laying the groundwork for it—is to lose the election, but claim it was all rigged and Crooked Hillary stole a victory that was rightfully his. There doesn't have to be any evidence of election fraud; he can just claim it was the media conspiring against him, or anything else that sounds good. He can pretend he isn't REALLY a loser, and he gets to go back to being a real-estate developer who every thinks is mega-successful, but whose primary function these days is licensing out his name to put on projects being built by actual real-estate developers. This has already been incredibly divisive (about half of Trump supporters ALREADY think the election will be rigged, and their guy hasn't even lost yet.) And I'm pretty sure Trump doesn't care if it's divisive. I'm pretty sure he's happy to sacrifice any chance at any kind of national unity, just to have more people who can reinforce the idea that he isn't a loser. That's not the sort of character you want to see in a Presidential nominee; although in Trump's defense, he never set out to be one….