The mainstream media worked itself into a frothy frenzy this week with proclamations of Donald Trump’s demise, and once again they may be doing so prematurely.
Trump needs to stay on message and hammer repeatedly his America First vision — secure borders, secure jobs, and security from militant Islam.
Central to this prophecy of inevitable electoral defeat is the notion that Trump is running his campaign as if he were still in the primaries, and that his inability to shift gears — highlighted by a number of alleged gaffes — is leading to an inevitable trouncing in the general election.
“You play one game when you’re at Augusta and it’s 65 degrees and it’s a light breeze,” Joe Scarborough said on Wednesday. “And it’s a completely different game when you’re at the British Open and it’s 40 miles an hour and the wind and the rain and the sleet is coming straight at your face. He should understand that, but he doesn’t understand it, it seems.”
There’s no escaping the fact that since wrapping up the nomination, Donald Trump has missed some important opportunities to shore up his general election prospects, and made a few tactical errors that could have been avoided easily.
That his comments regarding Judge Curiel allowed the mainstream media and liberals to call him racist was avoidable had Trump framed his criticisms of Judge Curiel’s personal conflicts of interest — rather than raising a broader point about his heritage playing a role.
When Trump criticized President Obama’s reaction to the Orlando shooting, specifically the president’s refusal to lay blame at the foot of Islamic radicalism, he used language so vague it led Scarborough and others in the media to interpret Trump’s words as implying a conspiracy on Obama’s part.
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Not being politically correct is one thing — indeed for Trump it has been an asset — but he needs to be smarter about how he presents himself now that the media and the Clinton campaign are focused on doing anything and everything they can to sink him.
Trump’s criticisms of Judge Gonzalo Curiel’s handling of the Trump University case, and his criticisms of Obama’s response to the Islamic terror attack in Orlando, were reasonable and legitimate criticisms to make. But the manner in which Trump made those comments gave the media ammunition with which to attack him as racist and even unhinged. Trump’s message is there — his delivery needs work.
Of course this isn’t the first time the connoisseurs of conventional wisdom have declared Trump’s election prospects dead. From the very start of his campaign, when he said that “when Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best,” media pundits said he wouldn’t make it through the primary process, let alone be the last one standing.
After he said Sen. John McCain is “not a war hero,” people were certain he’d ruined his prospects with pro-military Republicans. When he attacked Megyn Kelly for her line of questioning during the first debate, and in a handful of incidents since, pundits declared he would never win the GOP nomination.
The media was wrong on those numerous occasions, and they could very well be wrong again.
Trump still has time to turn his floundering campaign around. First of all, Trump needs to stop taking criticism personally, and avoid making his own criticisms seem personal — especially when, as in the Curiel or Orlando cases, those criticisms could have been used to make a broader point.
Trump also needs to stay on message and hammer repeatedly his America First vision — secure borders, secure jobs, and security from militant Islam — rather than attack this or that American political figure.
If Trump can spend the next two weeks without putting his foot in his mouth and delivers consistently substantive — and on-message — speeches, capped off with a great speech at the convention, he can silence his current critics both within the GOP and without and blunt the media’s onslaught, giving him room to make his case properly to the American people, and earn their votes.
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