For a man who brags endlessly about his deal-making skills, Donald Trump seems to know nothing about closing the deal on his latest venture.
Much like his unfortunate attempts at running a steak business and a university, Trump’s political machine has sky-high name recognition but a product that leaves a foul taste in your mouth.
Judging by his effort to wrangle loyal delegates to go to the Cleveland convention, Trump may be the most successful and least competent presidential candidate in living memory.
This weekend he was shut out of the delegate race in Colorado. And he somehow contrived to lose most of the delegates selected in South Carolina, where he ran away with the popular vote just two months ago.
This is a pattern across the country. Behind the scenes, he’s losing the battle to control the convention delegates from Indiana, Georgia and Massachusetts. “We’ve got a corrupt system. It’s not right. We’re supposed to be a democracy,” he responded angrily at the weekend. “You vote and the vote means something. And we’ve got to do something about it.”
If his books and speeches have any organizing thesis, it’s that Trump – and only Trump – understands the true dynamic of life and business. Somehow, he neglected to figure out that the true dynamic of a presidential primary campaign is to amass enough delegates to secure the nomination. All the rest is confetti.
This campaign is less The Art of the Deal and more Finger Painting a President.
Small wonder that there are tensions in what passes for Trump HQ, where the boss is now placing more faith and power in the hands of a veteran convention-wrangler and lobbyist, Paul Manafort.
However, it would be premature to declare the Trump campaign dead on arrival in Cleveland.
Trump first died after the summer of Trump, the fall of Trump and the winter of Trump. He was later deceased after his suicidal slugfests with John McCain, the pope, and the majority of the population known as “women”.
How will he rise from the dead once again?
In less than two weeks, Trump will ride majestically along a New York escalator to a victory that the polls suggest is somewhere between 25 and 35 points. A week later, he will fly what’s left of Trump Airlines to Pennsylvania, where he is heading to a double-digit victory.
Indiana may be next door to John Kasich’s Ohio, but it’s also next door to Kentucky and Illinois, where Trump won comfortably. The next big state after that is New Jersey, which is either Trump’s spiritual home or the actual home of his bag-handler, Governor Chris Christie.
But let’s say those victories are not enough. Let’s say the arcane rules of delegate allocations leave Trump just a few short fingers away from the magic number that will clinch the nomination. How will he react to the chaos of a contested convention?
First, he will declare victory. Then he will resort to his favored business strategy: litigation. After all, he already threatened to sue when Ted Cruz won more delegates out of Louisiana’s state convention despite losing the primary contest there.
Of course, if all else fails, Trump could continue to stoke up threats of violence, as he did last month when pondering the thought of a contested convention.
“I think you’d have riots,” he told CNN. “If you disenfranchise those people, and you say, ‘I’m sorry, you’re 100 votes short,’ even though the next one is 500 votes short, I think you’d have problems like you’ve never seen before. I think bad things would happen, I really do. I believe that. I wouldn’t lead it, but I think bad things would happen.”
This is not the talk of a presidential candidate who will go quietly into that good night. There will be no endorsements, and no hugs on stage. There will be no attempt to heal the party for the good of the nation.
Some Democrats have begun to fear that a contested convention will allow a more electable Republican to emerge from the primordial soup. They need not worry.
Whether Trump wins or loses the nomination, the GOP has already lost the general election. The party’s despairing Never-Trumpers will not reconcile with the diehard Trumpista rebels. Both sides will fail to rally around a compromise candidate. And the damage done among women and Latino voters is already beyond repair.
If he is denied the nomination and survives the ensuing riot, Trump himself will stay on our television screens as a permanent pundit. He may run as a third-party candidate, or he may just subtweet what remains of the election.
After all, the news media long ago succumbed to the crack cocaine of Trump clicks and ratings. As Megyn Kelly of Fox News told the Women in the World conference, the news media has put its thumb on the scale of this election with its saturation coverage of every Trump eruption.
“We have to worry about numbers to some extent,” Kelly said, “but we also have to worry about our souls and journalism.”
Whatever happens, the soul of Donald Trump lives on. It will endure long after his presidential and physical demise. He will get spotted alongside Elvis on the front page of the National Enquirer. The dream shall not die.
