There are some people who, having been born on third base, stand there believing they hit a triple. Donald Trump was born on third base and thinks he invented baseball.
Trump’s father Fred made himself, building an empire from nothing. Donald Trump took what his father had already created and made it bigger, flashier, and, sometimes, more bankrupt. He’s made plenty of money in the process, to be sure—though it’s commonly believed that his actual worth isn’t nearly what he says it is—but much of it is from licensing and branding based on the outsize persona he’s created for himself, not the real-estate genius he claims.
At some point along the way, Trump started believing his own hype. He is a man who seems to think he can do no wrong, a man who does not know just how much he does not know. And a man like that can be very dangerous to any Presidential candidate to whom he is connected. Your typical campaign surrogate can be controlled, if not with the judicious use of carrots and sticks, then because they know politics, or at least they know enough to listen to political wisdom from smart people. Trump’s ego is too big for that—if he’s doing something, it is, by definition, the right thing.
All this came to a particularly ugly head for Mitt Romney and his campaign on Tuesday, the day Romney arrived in Las Vegas for a fundraiser with Trump and Newt Gingrich. Not coincidentally, Trump also had yet another of his not-so-occasional outbursts of birtherism on Tuesday, this one bad enough that nearly all of the rational political observers out there spent much of the day marvelling at the spectacle Trump was making of himself, and the fool he was making of Romney.
Still, Trump himself remained convinced of his own brilliance, as he demonstrated in a bizarre ten-minute interview he gave to CNN’s Wolf Blitzer. The issue of Barack Obama’s eligibility for the Presidency, Trump said, is “something that bothers Obama very much, and I will tell you it’s not an issue that he likes talking about, so what he does is uses reverse psychology on people like you, so that you report, like, ‘Oh, gee, he’s thrilled with it.’ ”
But, of course, Obama’s campaign is thrilled with it. As I wrote last week, birtherism is good for business, even for—perhaps especially for—the left. Thanks in part to Trump’s efforts last year, the President’s long-form birth certificate has been released to the public, and the White House doesn’t need to worry that independents will doubt their man’s eligibility. So with Trump’s latest circus act, he’s just doing the Obama campaign multiple favors: he’s helping them portray Romney as weak and craven, he’s firing up the Democratic base, and he’s distracting the media from the issues that could actually hurt the reëlection campaign. (And the media does play a role here—again, birtherism is good for business, which would explain why not long after the Blitzer-Trump faceoff, CNN’s crawl read, “Wolf’s Trump interview blows up on Twitter.”)
Ultimately, Trump and his behavior won’t decide this election. But he doesn’t seem to offer Romney any real upside, and the presumptive Republican nominee can’t afford to lose many news cycles the way he lost Tuesday’s. Dropping Trump at this point will look bad; the consequences of keeping him around could be worse.
Photograph by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images.
