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Gillian Tett
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SellingDonaldTrump
Earlier this month, I attended a delightful dinner in New York with a collection of Republican luminaries. Unsurprisingly, the conversation was dominated by the topic of Donald Trump – and many of the assembled Republicans were deeply anxious.
Little wonder: in recent days Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for president, has delivered another stream of invective that makes many top Republicans cringe; or, more accurately, long for the patrician self-control of a man such as George HW Bush.
But this particular dinner included an intriguing twist: the main speaker at the table was a charming Republican power broker who
I shall call “Bob”. And Bob had arrived with a mission to “sell” Trump – verbal gaffes and all.
Bob has dealt extensively with The Donald for many years and endorsed him. And now he has embarked on the challenging task of persuading other elite Republicans to do the same.
So how do you make Trump sound palatable to nervous conservative voters? It is worth laying out the sales pitch I heard from Bob, not because I endorse it but because I suspect these arguments will be tossed around numerous other dinner tables in the coming weeks and months.
Essentially, Bob’s argument boiled down to three points. First – and most obviously – Trump is a genius at connecting with the crowds. That is one good reason for Republicans to embrace him, Bob said, given that other leaders of the GOP have lacked that popular touch (just think of Mitt
Romney or Jeb Bush).
Second, Trump also has innate “leadership” skills and is “decisive”, not least because he is, according to Bob,
“the first entrepreneur to run for president”.
Of course, the fact that
Trump has spent his life in business does have one huge disadvantage in the eyes of the political class: he does not speak or act like a traditional
politician – just listen to his aggressive diatribes. But as the wine flowed over dinner, Bob smoothly brushed away the misgivings that some Republicans might feel about Trump’s more incendiary comments by stressing that The Donald is still a political neophyte.
And that leads into the third – and most important – point in this sales pitch: Trump will only be the frontman of any Republican campaign. More specifically, precisely because he is a political neophyte, he does not have the type of sophisticated organisational framework or funding structure in place that is needed to win elections. Under normal circumstances, that might seem to be a disadvantage but it underlines his outsider credentials, while at the same time leaving room for the Republican establishment to bring its own ideas, funding machine and priorities into play.
Or to put it another way, Trump is best viewed as an “empty vessel” that men such as Paul Ryan, the speaker of the House of
Representatives, will fill, by providing the policy brains and organisational brawn.
And that, Bob argued, is why senior
Republicans should now fall in line: by voting for Trump now, you get a future administration that will be essentially controlled by people such as Ryan. Now I dare say that some FT readers will recoil in horror from the cynicism embedded in this sales pitch; others will argue that it is dangerously naive. After all, it is far from clear right now that the Republican elite can ever control Trump – not least because it is even less certain that Trump can control himself. But by the end of the meal I had the impression that the table was split: some of the diners were still too uneasy to vote for Trump; others were reluctantly falling in line. But what happens next is anyone’s guess; we now live in a political Alice-in-Wonderland world. 6 gillian.tett@ft.com
