If this is Donald Trump’s definition of winning…
PR331: “Winning,” Trump style
One of the benefits of being on the correct side of a controversy is that most of the best facts lineup with you. No one can convince me that one of Kellyanne Conway’s secret wishes isn’t about doing a job as easy as, say, defending Barack Obama for wearing a tan suit. She could put her talent for outraged polemics to some genuine use there. It must get wearying, defending Trump. And no one can convince me that, among his aides, advisors and operatives, the phrase “Oh my god what has that bastard tweeted this time?” is never heard. It just isn’t possible to do the job that the White House press office does without somebody, somewhere, at least thinking that.
The Trump disaster juggernaut, well into its third year with an election on the visible horizon, has its work cut out for it. It’s going to have to find a way to convince the American people that they are tired of “winning,” and they’ll have to pull it off with all the same kind of force of evidence available to convince people in the midst of a famine that they are tired of eating.
I also wonder how Trump supporters will weather the storm of Trump’s indifference to their suffering while they, ahem, weather the storm. I don’t know about you, but if one of history’s biggest hurricanes was heading my way, I’d feel a lot better about a president who made a good natured joke about forgetting that Alabama does not border the Atlantic Ocean, and got on with the business of disaster relief, than one who doubled down on the gaffe and made convincing everyone it wasn’t a gaffe after all the most important thing, even more important than helping me and my family.
And I don’t know about you, but if I owned a publicly held manufacturing business whose very survival depended on a healthy stock market, I’m not sure I would be able to continue to support – that is to say, write checks to – a presidential campaign to reelect a man so thin skinned that he cannot keep from tweeting things that send that very market plummeting, while manufacturing numbers continue to move very much in the wrong direction.
And I don’t know about you, but if I were a religious leader who was a Trump supporter who pretended to have morals, I would be awfully disappointed to learn that a porn star, whom Trump paid $130,000 to keep quiet, was about to publicly testify before the House Judiciary Committee next month. In fact, I would be disappointed in a lot of things about that foul-mouthed, tantrum-throwing, man-baby president.
One of the countless promises Trump made to get elected, along with the one where he said that he’d build a wall and make Mexico pay for it, along with the one where he said he’d release his tax returns if elected, along with the one where he said he’d defeat ISIS in the first 100 days, along with the one where he said he would dismantle Obamacare and replace it with something better, was the one where he said he would win so much that we would all get tired of winning. Well he was half right about that. We are tired.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.