Today
brought Trump staff shake-up number three and campaign leader number three-ish and
with it a sense of the direction the campaign will take.
Donald Trump
has proven himself incapable of being a “normal” candidate. His attempts lasted
at most a few days or so before Trump said something else that so violates
norms that a huge controversy ensued. Even if Donald Trump could pull off being
normal, it does not seem likely to work. Trump being normal means Trump being
boring. Given the damage some of his comments have already done, boring Trump
is losing Trump.
This shake-up
is about returning to what makes Trump, Trump.
Donald Trump may not be able to improve his own performance so the best
way for him to win is to attack, savage and destroy Hillary Clinton. Even the
words, Clinton scandals, produce an endless stream of unpleasant thoughts. A
great many of the “scandals” are bogus but a few are based in reality. Trump
will also invent new, possibly darker ones.
Steve Bannon of Brietbart News seems like a great guy to help invent and
sharpen such stories.
Trump seems
to be doing the equivalent of “shooting the moon” in the card game, Hearts. The
game’s goal is to avoid points that come from capturing hearts and the queen of
spades. But if you capture all of the hearts and the queen of spades, you get
to either add all of those points to your opponent’s score, or subtract them all
from yours. This is shooting the moon. If you fail to shoot the moon, however,
it is extremely damaging because you likely take on a large number of points.
Trump may
have nothing left to lose by this strategy. His goal may simply be to make
Clinton so unpopular that he wins by default. The odds of shooting the moon in
Hearts are very low but there are points in the game where it is a wise
strategy because there is no other way to win. Trump has very little to lose by
trying it. But the same cannot be said of Congressional Republicans. There is still
lots up for grabs for them. The bigger Trump loses, the worse it can be for
them. It’s unlikely Trump cares about that. Trump aims to shoot the moon and
does not care about the consequences.
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