Is Donald Trump really going to be the President of United States?

Ladies and Gentlemen, boys and girls, kids, and gentle readers, I just saw a great reply to the question raised in the title of this blog and would like to share it.

 

It's by Geoffrey Widdison, Engineer, reader, thinker, dreamer. scientist, scholar and general all around nice guy!

Is Donald Trump really going to be the President of United States?

 

No.

I mean, he's come much farther and done much better than I would have expected at first.  He is amazingly media savvy and an incredibly effective negotiator who knows how to leverage his blustering fool persona for all its worth.  Scott Adams, on his blog, makes a convincing case that just about everything Trump has done so far has been part of a very clever and deliberately planned strategy.  I do think he's smarter than I want to give him credit for.

But...  All that said, everything he's doing is incredibly self limiting.  It's great for getting him in the spotlight and promoting his personal brand (which I still believe is the entire point of his run), but it's not going to get him a majority of the American vote.  And the Republican Party knows that, which is why the leadership will, in the end, do whatever they can to keep him from getting the nomination.

Trump's strategy has very quickly captured that section of the electorate that a) has a lot of conservative anger, b) doesn't really care about policy, and c) hates the fact that they can't say what they really think.  It's like Mark Cuban said "it's not what he says, it's that he says it."  There's a segment of the voting population that's been starving for someone who's willing to say, out loud, what they've been thinking, and Trump is that guy, so he captures them all in short order.

The problem with this strategy is that there's a reason no one else says these things: because they alienate all the rest of the potential voters.  Trump isn't even trying to win over the majority of the electorate, he's saying deliberately offensive things, which his base loves him for, and the larger population hates him for.

Example: recently two guys in Boston brutally beat a homeless man, and one of them told the police "Donald Trump was right, all these illegals need to be deported."  Now, that's embarrassing, but easy to defuse, you just roundly condemn violence, offer your sympathies to the victim and redirect the conversation.  

 

How did Trump respond?  "I will say that the people who are following me are very passionate. They love this country and they want this country to be great again."

What?!?!??

Who on earth would respond to a hate crime that way?  That's exactly the wrong thing to say. He's basically brushing off a racially motivated assault as passion and patriotism.

 It's an objectively horrible thing to say, and any sane, decent person would condemn him for it.  But it gets him more attention, more coverage, makes him seem even more bold and unapologetic, and the people who will hate him for it generally hated him already.  It's not what you say if you want most people to like you, it is what you way if you want most people to hear about you.

It's a brilliant strategy if you want to get yourself in the spotlight and increase your own fame.  It's a terrible strategy if you want to be President.  Either Donald Trump is too dumb to realize this, or he never intended to be President, and this whole thing is a self-promotion tour.  I can't say for sure which it is, but, as I mentioned, I think he's smarter than I used to give him credit for.

 

http://www.quora.com/Is-Donald-Trump-really-going-to-be-the-president-of-United-States