The best reaction to Donald Trump is silence. Simply don't acknowledge his existence. Don't give him what he wants: free media attention for his boorish personal attacks on Republicans and phony "populist" blithering. It's the worst thing you could do to him and the last thing he wants.
- Me, a week ago
Is the GOP presidential field taking that sage advice? Are you kidding?:
Republican presidential candidates dismissed the dominance of Donald Trump in early primary polling, scrambling to position themselves days before their first debate.
While candidates and their teams have spent hours privately strategizing how best to tackle the billionaire businessman in Thursday's debate, they publicly discounted the idea of Trump's rise even as a new poll showed the billionaire businessman continuing a summer surge.
"Anybody can do well for a month in this business, especially if you have talent and you have personality, and Donald does," New Jersey Governor. Chris Christie said on CNN's State Of The Union.
The fact that all the candidates (other than Governor Walker) are strategizing and agonizing and obsessing over "tackling" Trump gives the lie to the airy dismissals of Trump's rise. Which is why I think it's pretty clear that they're all (other than Governor Walker) going to try to dogpile Trump, make the entire debate about Trump, and further forfeit their remaining support and send it all in Trump's direction. Kind of like trying to put out a house fire with that retardant combination of hydrogen and napalm.
That certainly seems to be The Donald's expectation:
Trump, meanwhile, tried to lower expectations for his first debate appearance, which will test his ability to present himself as a serious contender for the White House. "I'd like to discuss the issues. I'm not looking to take anybody out or be nasty to anybody," he said in an interview on NBC's Meet The Press. ''You have to counter-punch. But I'm not looking to start anything."
"These politicians — I always say, they're all talk, no action. They debate all the time," he said in an interview on ABC's This Week. ''I don't debate." He also spoke by phone on CBS' Face The Nation.
Hey, he's on top of the (meaningless) national GOP primary polls. And you know the old saying in pro wrestling: The challenger has to beat the champion, the champion doesn't have to beat the challenger. Why should he take any chances on getting exposed as the Donk charlatan he really is? Or blustering into an avalanche of gaffes? The rest of the field has to come to him, right? Even though they actually don't. But he knows they will, and that that will only drive his poll numbers higher.
That's the thing about this Trump phenomenon - its fundamental irrationality. He's been pretty much a lifelong Democrat, supporting the Clintons and Obama and abortion rights and socialized medicine and amnesty for years, yet all he had to do is make some "controversial" remarks against illegal immigration and most of the Tea Party embraced him without a single neuron firing. But when you point out his past Democrat orthodoxy, and the more you do so, the more stubbornly loyal to Trump those TPers become. The only thing to which I can compare it in the past thirty-five years that I've been following and commenting on American politics is the way that each Bill Clinton scandal made him even more popular. It's a sort of counter-intuitive mass psychosis that can't be reasoned with because reason has nothing to do with it. It's driven entirely by emotion - anger - and emotion is impervious to reasoned, substantive argument.
And that, in turn, is why the usual counter-strategy - attacking the front-runner - is the diametically worst angle for the rest of the GOP field to take. In a Bizarro World of counter-intuition, you must do the opposite of what normally makes sense. And that means ignoring Donald Trump and giving him as little attention and free media oxygen as possible.
Put out the Trump fire with the vacuum of space, in so many words. Who knows, that may be the only way to goad him into making a mistake and showing his true colors, absent any GOP-provided "distractions".
Pity the debate is going to look like a Bruce Lee movie instead.
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