POLITICS, SOCIETY, HISTORY
For Trump, Winning Isn’t the Point
This goes deeper than winning an election
There are analysts who note, rightly, that Trump’s strategy in the current American presidential election is not entirely rational. By any measure, he is well on the way to wrapping up the Republican nomination. Nikki Haley is continuing to run, of course, and putting up impressive numbers, but in a winner-take-all system a consistent forty percent is meaningless for the nomination. By any rational standard, Trump should be starting to move to the center to position himself for the general election. Instead, he seems to be going out of his way to antagonize anyone who is not already a member of the Trump-MAGA cult.
It can be a problem to be too rational in our analysis. Reason, based on our traditional notions of American electoral politics, can be a liability in the current climate. These are not rational times. Trump is not a rational candidate.
This is not about winning an election
Most people are working on the assumption that Trump is running to win this year’s presidential election in the United States. That makes sense: he feels he’s been wronged, he needs the power of the presidency to derail the prosecution of his past crimes, and in the final analysis he may try to…
