Politics prove Trump’s no politician
JULY 19TH, 2016 — POST 197
This weekend saw presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump announce his running mate in Indiana Governor Mike Pence. For a presidential candidate who has fuelled his jets with anti-establishment sentiment, a Trump-Pence ticket is a move to win back social conservatives and those who might have been deterred by the aggression Trump injected into the GOP candidate race. Pence is an attempt to balance the scales: to project a Trump presidency as ravenously radical with a warm fuzzy family man core. And Trump said as much during the announcement of the ticket.
“One of the big reasons I chose Mike is party unity, I have to be honest.”
In the only way he knows how — that is with the subtlety and nuance of a turducken — Trump is deploying Pence to be the suture for a wound in the party Trump opened with such bombast, and with such effectiveness.
So the fact that Pence appears likeable enough and level-headed, seemingly minted from the standard-white-guy-press fully formed, is a benefit to Trump’s presidential campaign. But as well as providing a balance in tone, the clarinet to Trump’s sousaphone, Pence’s presence is doing something else. Something that, thinking about it now, any vice presidential nominee would do to Trump’s image. Pence, the clean-cut party politician, is showing the world everything Trump lacks.
The distinctness Trump has as a candidate was what allowed him to crush the bloated GOP field. Trump’s gold-plated surname — and gold-tinted skin and hair — reduced the other 16 (!) GOP candidates to clones. Not one of them could break from the pack because Trump was already so far apart. Trump was wanted because he was everything no one else was. And he owned it. But with Pence beside him, he’s crippled. He can no longer set himself apart from the squares because now he has one sitting next to him. Always.
These fissures are starting to show. As Vox reports, the first joint interview elucidated just how different these two men are. There are ideological differences that run back through each man’s history, most evident in their positions on the Iraq War. Trump even admitted he just doesn’t care that Pence supported the war, even when consistently using this very fact as ammunition against Clinton. But beyond policy and principled positions, the very mode of communication used by either man, especially under the scrutiny of explicitly posed questions, has them looking like Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Trump’s all “gonna”s, “wanna”s, “incredible”, “big league”. And this language worked for him. But to see that his ally — literally the person the voting public is supposed to read as his right-hand man — is able to stay on message, to actually (attempt to before being interrupted) answer the question in the mode in which it was posed turns Trump into a pre-linguistic hominid before your eyes.
No longer does Trump just have to deflect challenges from a media that now largely has decided to finally call him out properly. The main force by which Trump legitimacy as a presidential candidate, let alone a presidential nominee, is being undermined is a force Trump and his campaign staff have themselves selected. The speed at which Trump swept the nation had a lot of people wondering if he could be stopped. It’s fitting then that Trump is the only person capable of stopping himself. And Pence, but frankly probably any running mate, won’t be surmounted.
I know I’m dicing with the same fate that befell so many analysts and commentators to whom the very notion of Trump running for GOP nomination was hysterical. (But as an Australian mostly concerned with the personality study on show, I don’t have much to lose). As seductive as Trump’s “speak from the heart”, silent majority rhetoric is, that knife is looking increasingly dull in the light of just how complex the position he’s gunning for is.
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