Campaigns matter.
That’s a long-time conceit of political consultants, of course. We say it all the time. I even worked at a successful political consulting firm which trademarked the phrase. Campaigns Matter™.
Campaigns matter – along with its corollary, “the only poll that matters is the one on Election Day” – are central to the political consultant’s belief system. It is the foundation upon which our entire catechism is built.
If nobody believed that campaigns matter so much, we’d all be out of business and pumping gas somewhere. The campaign managers, the ad guys, the pollsters, the advance people, the digital elflords, the speechwriters, the debate prep team: all of us need potential clients to believe that “campaigns matter” if we are to survive. It is critical.
Except for, you know: Donald Trump. Agent Orange’s successes, inter alia, forcefully make the case that the political class should all find a new line of work.
Trump was a political seismic event in many ways, of course. Trump shattered the Western liberal democratic consensus in respect of trade, immigrants, refugees, security and race. He upended every convention.
He also showed everyone, in a yuge way, that campaigns now don’t matter much at all. Consider the evidence.
Think about it. A tape came out, mid-campaign, in which Donald Trump boasted about sexually assaulting women. He insulted military veterans and war heroes and Gold Star families – people considered deities in the U.S. political firmament. He repeatedly made racist statements. He attacked the Pope and the disabled. He invited a hostile foreign power to invade the privacy of American citizens – and the hostile foreign power did. He refused to release his taxes, unlike every other presidential candidate in modern times. He said, and did, things that were crazy.
And he still won.
Donald Trump – the combed-over, sphincter-mouthed, racist, sexist, fascistic Human Cheeto – showed all of us that Campaigns Don’t Matter. You can run a really shitty one, like he did, and still win.
But. But one thing, and it is deliciously ironic. It is schadenfreude on a scale heretofore unseen in politics. It is frigging beautiful.
You can see it in the decisions of federal judges in Maryland and Hawaii, issued late last week – but particularly in the must-read decision of Judge Derrick K. Watson, of Federal District Court in Honolulu. In it, Judge Watson threw out Trump’s second (allegedly kinder and gentler) executive order seeking a Muslim ban. And he did so by relying upon the words of Donald Trump himself.
Judge Watson dismissed the Trump regime’s claim that a court would need to probe the Unpresident’s “veiled psyche” to locate religious animus. Jusdge Watson would have none of it. Repeatedly, he cited Trump statements that were helpfully found in the pages of the lawsuit brought by Hawaii’s attorney general.
“There is nothing ‘veiled’ about this press release,” Judge Watson wrote, quoting a Trump campaign document titled “Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.”
Said he: “A reasonable, objective observer would conclude that the executive order was issued with a purpose to disfavour a particular religion.”
The general consensus, now, is that the short-fingered vulgarian – per Canadian Graydon Carter’s now-immortal phrase – will continue to be hoisted on his own petard. As he labours to render the United States of America an Aryan Nation, Donald Trump will continue to lose in court. That is now very clear, to every legal scholar and constitutional expert.
Why? Because of Donald Trump’s own words. Because of the racist, bigoted things he said in his presidential campaign. Because what he said, over and over, is now being used against him.
Campaigns may not matter any more. Donald Trump has proven that.
But words? Words matter.
He’s proven that, too.
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