On occasion, Frank Luntz can be useful

Frank Luntz held another focus group. (I simply cannot express how much I regret not getting into this racket.) Observes Time magazine:

[A]ll of them had been selected because they like (or love) Trump….

The focus group watched taped instances on a television of Trump’s apparent misogyny, political flip flops and awe-inspiring braggadocio. They watched the Donald say Rosie O’Donnell has a "fat, ugly face." They saw that Trump once supported a single-payer health system, and they heard him say, "I will be the greatest jobs president God ever created"….

At the end of the session, the vast majority said they liked Trump more than when they walked in.

Of course they did; that's the way most opinions work. You show me a man or woman full of self-certainties and I'll show you a human being who will give no quarter to countervailing evidence. Indeed, when put on the spot, each will dig in deeper.

Yet the kind of adulation shown to the — let's be charitable — "unorthodox" Trump is rarely sustained. To sustain it, the adulated must tirelessly crank up the crazy, and with each crank, he loses a bit of that adulation among a bit of that base. Celebrated case in point: Joe McCarthy's sliding poll numbers well before his humiliating senatorial censure.

You will note, in Time's reporting, that "the vast majority" said they liked Trump even more after viewing his screened misogyny, etc. etc. We are unsurprised. But that means a minority did not — which might represent some aforementioned chipping away.

I just hope the chips, if that they be, turn not into chunks before February, March, April ...

 

Comments

[Anne J]

He should last into at least the beginning of next year, if he doesn't turn out to be the Roman candle I think he may be. With him, you never know. He could ride this wave of drooling fan boys and girls all the way to the White House or at least the GOP nomination.

[Peter G]

We all have our inner asshole do we not? Psychologists from Freud on have used different nomenclature but basically that is what it comes down to. In our dreams and fantasies what home truths sacred to ourselves would we not blurt out but for the repercussions we know would follow. "Follow your inclinations with due regard to the policeman round the corner." wrote Somerset Maugham in Of Human Bondage. But his character was speaking figuratively with the policeman as metaphor.

To his hard core supporters Trump is the asshole they wish they could be. Ideology? Policy? What are these things to someone experiencing the pure joy of watching a man be an asshole to everyone to whom they wish they could say the very same things? PM is right when speaks of the minorities among his current supporters disenchanted with the truths that were revealed to them. Some will turn away. But I do not fear mass desertion. For these hard core supporters Trump offers the audacity of hope. He offers the hope that Trump will not just say things to people. He will do them.

Of course he can't but they don't know that.

[RT]

Trump is the Bulworth of the right. No wonder they love him.

[Jon Ponder]

As an ex-pat New Yorker, I've been to this rodeo before. Next up: the shtick grows old.