GOP Advice: To Top Trump, Tap Into Trumpism

Establishment Republicans have a problem. Donald Trump isn't going away.

After five months and going strong as the party's front-runner for president, the Grand Old Party's elites have figured out that the billionaire real estate mogul and television star really could win the GOP nomination.

Why not? He's defied all of the conventional wisdom so far.

In a seven-page confidential memo, the National Republican Senatorial Committee offers poll-tested advice to you, if you're a GOP candidate, on how to get your campaign's message out, even when voters and reporters are eager to hear you sound like Trump -- for better or worse.

The central theme of the memo, which comes from NRSC executive director Ward Baker, boils down to tap into Trumpism without mimicking Trump.

That makes sense. Republicans are in a delicate situation. They desperately want the bonanza in TV ratings and support from the party's base that Trump brings to the party. They just don't want Trump.

He is, after all, a wild card. Whether he is in the race for profit, public service or pure ego trip, no one knows for sure. Yet, tough as it may be to live with him, party leaders are afraid to lose him unless they can keep his voters.

"We may not like it," the memo says, "but Trump has connected with voters on issues like trade with China and America's broken borders."

Issues, that is, on which the GOP has somehow lost contact with those voters. Take off your business suit, the memo advises. Roll up your shirtsleeves and start talking to people in simple words, not about "issues" but about their "problems."

"Don't insult key voter cohorts," the memo cautions, "by ignoring that America has significant problems and that Trump is offering basic solutions."

And what sort of "basic solutions" is Trump offering as he "challenges our politically correct times?" The memo does not say, probably because they know how Trump unloads both barrels on anyone who criticizes him.

And candidate Trump makes himself hard not to criticize -- which only brings millions of dollars' worth of free media every day. (Including, alas, this column.)

What's Trump's secret? His oddball campaign strategy appears to have risen out of his dubious challenge to President Obama's Hawaiian birth certificate. With more mouth than actual evidence, Trump's baseless allegations gleaned a surprisingly hu-u-u-uge (as he might say) amount of publicity that included a humorous response from Obama and photo evidence of the original certificate.

But the real lesson from the birth certificate escapade was simply this: Facts don't matter when you're giving people an excuse to hate people whom they already want to hate.

As Trump bloviates and ad-libs like a Hollywood lampoon of a TV-age demagogue, his numbers have climbed or held steady with disturbing ease as he falsely claimed thousands of Muslims "filled the streets" in New Jersey to celebrate the 9/11 attacks and tweeted bogus statistics to assert falsely that most killings of whites are done by blacks.

He also embraced the notion of killing the families of Islamic State terrorists to intimidate other terrorists and suggested that torture, closing mosques and forcing registration of Muslims might not be bad ideas in a Trump presidency.

If this played well, a new Washington Post/ABC News poll may tell why. Nearly half of Republican and GOP-leaning voters (47 percent) both support the deportation of undocumented immigrants and oppose the acceptance of refugees from Syria or other conflicts in the Mideast -- and slightly more than half of that pro-deportation/anti-refugee group supports Trump.

No wonder establishment Republicans are upset with Trump. He fans the flames of xenophobia even as his party is trying to expand its racial and ethnic diversity.

Trump doesn't care. He's grown his own complaining faction. Call them the "Trump grumps." They're angry not only at liberals but also at the GOP establishment for policies that have left them out of the nation's new digital-age prosperity.

Suddenly GOP leaders have a tiger named Trump by the tail and don't quite seem to know how to handle it. The irony is that they have only themselves to blame.

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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@tribune.com.)