Loose Lips Sink Presidential Campaigns

The Trump presidential campaign is taking on water. Whether it sinks sooner or later is still open to debate. Whether the celebrity billionaire decides to run as a third-party candidate, thus handing the election to Hillary Clinton remains to be seen.

Those of us who have been warning against the Trump candidacy have reason to feel slightly vindicated today.

By now you have heard the grossly offensive line over and over again. Speaking about John McCain, with whom he has been feuding, Trump said:

He’s not a war hero. He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured. 

Spoken by someone who never served in the military it was appallingly offensive. It brought instant condemnation from all sentient Republicans. They understand that such remarks, like the Todd Akin remark about rape during the last presidential election campaign, resonate with the people and tend to define, not only a candidate, but his party.

Jonah Goldberg feels especially vindicated:

He reminds me a lot of Mitt Romney, at least in one respect. I always said that Romney “spoke conservatism as a second language” (a line some people ripped off, btw). That’s why Romney called himself a “severe conservative,” talked about how he “likes to fire people,” and anathematized the “47 percent.”

Trump is even less truly conservative, but he’s trying to speak in an even grubbier dialect of conservatism. And, having grown up in the tabloid politics of New York, he’s better at faking it. Eventually, I suspect, this will be the cause of his undoing. He doesn’t know what he doesn’t know about conservatism, and at some point he will say something that even his biggest fans will recognize as a damning revelation about the real man beneath the schtick. The only question is whether he implodes before or after he does permanent damage to the GOP’s chances in 2016.

It’s the problem with unseasoned, untested candidates who have never worked in public service. He has not had the time to ponder all of the issues and to formulate appropriate responses. The best he can do, as a neophyte, is to shoot from the lips. Inexperience would have made it impossible for Donald Trump to function as president and inexperience will, with any luck, doom his candidacy… the sooner the better.

As I noted, Trump runs companies that have his name on the door. There, his word is law. To the extent that he is a celebrity his word has value when it provokes an emotional response and makes news.

The American presidency doesn’t work that way. 

Strangely enough, Trump did not say anything that falls under the category of political correctness. He insulted a war hero, a man who served his country honorably.

Being as the military and military families are a powerful Republican constituency, Trump has chosen to offend a group whose values of honor, duty, country are fundamental to the party. It looks like Trumps fifteen minutes of political fame are over. It remains to be seen whether he chooses to hand the presidency to Hillary Clinton.