Is Trump 2016 a branding exercise?

[Voyager]

@asahi

First of all, consider the fact that Donald’s a salesman and marketing guru, a deal maker as he likes to put it. I can’t see anyone like Donald, and with his particular temperament, having the patience for national security briefings, negotiating with foreign partners, building coalitions in congress, dealing with filibusters and procedural floor voting, and the nominations process. Let’s just start with that.

People run for office all the time with no intention of winning. When Bill Buckley was running for mayor of NY, someone asked him the first thing he’d do if he won. “Demand a recount,” he said. Trump could see how much money Palin made after running for VP, when Palin wasn’t even good at exploiting it.

But the kinds of antics he’s engaged in, and the comments he’s made, no serious candidate says or does these things. Nobody. And while you could say that maybe that’s some sort of hidden brilliance of the Donald, I just don’t buy it. If you’re serious and if you’re competitive enough to want to win at politics, you care about the end game, which apparently Donald does not. Otherwise he wouldn’t alienate women and Hispanics the way he has. And when you care about the end game, while you might push the envelope of what is acceptable, you (he) wouldn’t make these kinds of reckless comments and act like a junior high locker room bully.

I used to think he did this to lose votes - but he way over-estimated the intelligence and morality of the Republican base. I’m not sure now because inciting violence might be going a bit too far, but maybe I’m giving him too much credit.

I think the fact that he’s now getting more and more competitive is indeed attributable to his ego. He’s gone this far, and he’s ‘winning’. So it could be that his little gimmick has gotten more serious now, and maybe he’s emotionally caught up in the show that’s essentially authored.

Possible. However if his goal were to destroy the Republican party, he could hardly be doing it better, whether he wins or loses the nomination.

In addition to that, there’s probably some personal animus as well. It’s not too hard to make enemies in this process. I suspect that Donald Trump has developed a healthy dislike for some within the GOP, and I’m almost positive he has a personal disdain for Ted Cruz. I get the feeling Trump hates Cruz, that he hates his fake piety and just fraudulent personality, and that he would run as a third party candidate just to make sure that he doesn’t win.

Of course Trump hates Cruz, but nearly everyone hates Cruz. Even people who say they support Cruz hate Cruz. That’s about Trump’s least controversial position.

[MaxTheVool]

@The_Other_Waldo_Pepper

He would have won if if wasn’t for someone else winning?

I’ll freely admit that no claim seems beneath Trump. I’ll even grant that he’ll obviously have to supply some kind of excuse if he does as poorly as I hope. But if he’d planned to brazenly argle-bargle about a second-place finish, it seems like he’d be just as cavalier about a third-place finish, or a ninth-place finish, or whatever.

“Yeah, I could’ve been the heavyweight boxing champ. I would’ve broken records, believe me; I would’ve won so many fights, I would’ve kept winning, people would’ve gotten sick of me winning all the time; it would’ve been great, really great, if only somebody else hadn’t been out there, you know, throwing knockout punches.”

I think the implication is that his initial plan was just to get his name out there a lot… come in second, be taken seriously, get to speak at the convention, improve his brand. Then when he kept winning, his plan changed to the “I could have won…” idea. The question is whether it at some point changed (assuming we believe any of this at all) to actually wanting to be president.

[Measure_for_Measure]

I went over to OpenSecrets and looked at the top donors of the apparently defunct super-pac Make America Great Again.

Make America Great Again PAC Donors

The top 2 donors for July 2015 were Phil Ruffin (who gave a cool one million dollars) and Seryl Kushner (who gave $100,000). Phil Ruffin is a business partner of Trump, who co-owns Trump Tower Las Vegas. Seryl is one of Ivanka Trump’s in-laws.

Andy Beal gave $100,000 in early August. Andy Beal’s bank had lent a fair amount to Trump Entertainment Resorts, which Trump has nothing to do with and is owned by Carl Icahn’s company.

The point is this Super-Pac may very well have had the agenda laid out by the author of the piece. But that agenda isn’t necessarily identical to that of Donald Trump, probably to their consternation. Ruffin and Beal would gain from Trump’s brand building. A Trump Presidency is something they may have not seriously considered.