Tuesday, June 30, 2015

The Super-Quick Implosion of Donald Trump's Campaign



Ya gotta hand it to Donald Trump. Whenever he does something, he does it big. Huge...the biggest and the best!, as the self-aggrandizing Donald himself would say.

So it's no surprise that Trump wasted no time in creating a worldwide stir which imploded his 2016 presidential candidacy. Astonishingly, his ship actually sank during his announcement speech less than two weeks ago at NYC's Trump Tower. He hadn't even left the building and his nascent campaign was, for all intents and purposes, already over. 

So what actually happened at that podium ? Simple. Trump opened his mouth. That's it. Normally, when Trump opens his mouth, a cacophony of ignorant, narrow-minded incendiary rhetoric gets regurgitated. In this case, it was of the xenophobic variety:

"When do we beat Mexico at the border? They're laughing at us, at our stupidity. And now they are beating us economically. They are not our friend, believe me. ... When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best. They're not sending you. They're sending people that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems with us. They are bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people."

Trump simply can't help himself. His ego is so massive, so rapacious, so wildly out of control that, in needing to be fed, it leads him to say the darnedest things. Things that offend a massive amount of people across the political and racial spectrum. And one thing no candidate should do, especially a Republican looking to occupy the White House, is to summarily offend the entire Latino community.

Trump's shit storm took just 13 days to reach F5 status.  For a beat, polls seemed to indicate that the real estate mogul and television personality was gaining appreciable ground on the Republican Party's apparent front-runner Jeb Bush. But the controversy trailed him like a hunting dog, gaining negative steam every day. His offensive comments about Mexican immigrants were uniformly condemned on both sides of the aisle, and calls mounted for the cancellation of his television program Celebrity Apprentice and the Miss USA and Miss Universe beauty pageants.

And the networks listened. Last week Spanish-language television network Univision cancelled their scheduled broadcasts of the Trump-produced pageants, and on Monday NBC Universal did the same, cutting all ties with him, including stripping him of his role as host of Apprentice, which he claims to have already given up to run for president. 

But Trump doesn't seem to care that he appears to have lost both his television and political fortunes in one fell swoop. Because he loves his fuck-you money more. And even more than that he loves what it gives him: the unbridled freedom to do and say whatever the hell he wants, no matter who he offends in the process. Just as long as the cameras stay focused. An unprecedented media whore, he's the embodiment of the phrase, 'there's no such thing as bad press.' But he found out this week that, yes, there is indeed bad press. And thus his "candidacy" is over, before it even began.

On a side note, in the wake of the Supreme Court's historic ruling on gay marriage, it's been fascinating to watch Trump, a thrice-divorced philanderer, talk of his belief in "traditional marriage."