President Tr(i)ump(h) the Insult Comic Dog?
"You can't insult your way to the White House," Jeb Bush told Donald Trump in an early Republican presidential debate. Oh, really?
Trump has since seized a commanding lead as the party's frontrunner. Jeb Bush, who entered the race with the biggest war chest outside of Trump's pocket change, has dropped out.
Two of his remaining competitors, Sens. Marco Rubio of Florida and Ted Cruz of Texas, belatedly are trying to bully the Donald. That's a tough battle. History may well remember Trump's campaign as an ongoing imitation of his near-namesake, the foul-mouthed, cigar-chomping puppet Triumph the Insult Comic Dog.
It works because, despite his lack of experience in public office -- or, for that matter, public service -- Trump has studied the political scene closely over the past two decades as he contemplated and repeatedly backed away from the presidential run he finally is making now.
Why now? Why not? As the world can see, the Republicans have been limping through an odd state of disarray for years. They control most of the state governments and both houses of Congress, but they've lost the popular vote in five of the past six presidential races.
National leaders in the Grand Old Party urge outreach to women and minorities. Trump has taken an alternative path urged by numerous hard-core right-wingers: Beat the bushes to roust out conservatives who have stayed home on Election Day out of dismay and outright anger with a Washington that they feel has sold them out.
That's why the Donald has carved out what amounts to a third party in the making: tougher on illegal immigration and foreign trade deals, for example, than the conservative think-tank establishment but also more protective of Social Security, Medicare and other entitlements.
But before Trump could sell his agenda to the public he had to get our attention. That's where his insult-dog act came in. He astonished us with his affronts to Fox News' Megyn Kelly, a disabled New York Times reporter, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and other POWs and a growing list of other targets.
"Trump is what the psychologists call the 'empathic bully'," said best-selling human-behavior author Malcolm Gladwell on "The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore" the night after Super Tuesday.
It sounds odd to put "bully" together with "empathy." But as Gladwell explained, the ability to understand what and how others feel is very helpful to the bully who wants to read your weaknesses and exploit them to make you feel that much worse.
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