Trump 2.0? Don't Bet On It
Indeed, faced with the challenge of winning new voters and convention delegates in the political middle, Trump will have a tough time reaching out to the middle without losing his base on the right.
If Manafort is advising Trump to give "boring" a chance, that's good advice but I don't expect the Donald to follow it. After witnessing Trump build his brand in real estate, sports, beauty pageants and reality TV over the past four decades or so, it is obvious that he can't help himself. He's a showman. He loves, as the title of an old Broadway musical goes, the roar of the greasepaint and smell of the crowd. He doesn't do "boring."
In many ways, his message exemplifies the growth on the political right of a condition that conservatives usually criticize in the left: a persecution complex.
A "cult of victimology" was identified by John McWhorter, a Columbia University linguistics professor, in his 2000 book, "Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America."
"Victimology," the tendency to treat victimhood not as a problem to be solved but an identity to be nurtured, is one of three burdens by which our fellow African-Americans hold themselves back, McWhorter wrote.
The second was "self-segregation," by which some of us set ourselves apart from mainstream society through various identity politics. The third was "anti-intellectualism," which essentially values ignorance of new ideas or points of view.
The more I see these tendencies in black Americans these days, the more I also see them in white America, especially Trump's campaign, which exploits all three to rally his overwhelmingly white and largely blue-collar constituency.
For example, 54 percent of Trump supporters, compared to 37 percent of Cruz supporters and 35 percent of Kasich supporters, say whites losing out because of preferences for blacks and Hispanics is a bigger problem nationally than discrimination against those minority groups. That's according to an analysis of Washington Post/ABC News polling data by Greg Sargent's Plum Line blog.
Significantly, pollsters found that the Trump supporters were more likely to say they were "struggling economically," a condition that as a group they ironically hold in common with the black and Hispanic voters so many of them resent.
A truly great political leader would try to build bridges across racial and ethnic lines to help these groups work together to close widening gaps of income inequality and other grievances. We have not seen that sort of leadership from Trump and I don't expect to see it, although I am always eager to be surprised.
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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@tribune.com.)
(c) 2016 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.
