Donald Trump can’t turn ‘presidential’

When in his 1964 GOP acceptance speech Barry Goldwater declared that “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice,” a reporter sitting near journalist/historian Theodore White famously exclaimed: “My God, he’s going to run as Barry Goldwater!”

Six weeks into Donald Trump’s general election campaign, Republicans are discovering that he indeed intends to run as Donald Trump. He had boasted that he could turn “presidential” – respectful, respectable, reticent, reserved bordering on boring – at will. Apparently, he can’t.

GOP leaders who fell in line behind Trump after he clinched the nomination expected, or at least hoped, that he would prove malleable, willing to adjust his more extreme positions and tactics to suit a broader electorate.

Two problems. First, impulse control: Trump says what he actually feels, whatever comes into his head at any moment. Second, a certain logic: Trump won the primaries Sinatra-style, his way. So why change now?

Hence his response to the Orlando terror attack. First, he offered himself unseemly congratulations for his prescience about terrorism. (He’d predicted more would be coming. What a visionary.) Then he went beyond blaming the president for lack of will or wisdom in fighting terrorism, and darkly implied presidential sympathy for the enemy. “There’s something going on,” he charged. He then reiterated his ban on Muslim immigration.

Why? Because that’s what Trump does. And because it worked before. It was after December’s San Bernardino massacre that Trump first called for a Muslim ban. It earned him lots of opprobrium from GOP leaders and lots of support from GOP voters. He shot up in the polls, never to descend until he clinched. So why not do it again?

Because the general election is a different game. Trump assumes that the Republican electorate is representative of the national electorate. It’s not.

The other major example of doing what’s always worked is the ad hominem attack on big-dog opponents. It worked in the primaries. Trump went after one leading challenger after another, knocking them out sequentially.

Hillary Clinton is a lousy campaigner, but her machine is infinitely larger and more skilled than that of any of Trump’s 16 GOP competitors. More riskily, Trump is now going toe-to-toe with a sitting president.

Barack Obama is a skilled campaigner who clearly despises Trump and relishes the fight. And he carries the inestimable advantage of the gravitas automatically conferred by 7  1/2 years of incumbency. Moreover, he now enjoys an unusually high approval rating of around 53 percent. Trump’s latest favorability is 29 percent (Washington Post-ABC News).

Reagan biographer Lou Cannon thinks that the Goldwater anecdote is apocryphal. How could anyone (even a journalist) have thought that Goldwater, who later admitted he always knew he would lose, was going to run as anything but his vintage, hard-core self?

Same for Trump. Give him points for authenticity. Take away for electability.

This story was originally published June 17, 2016 at 6:16 PM with the headline "Donald Trump can’t turn ‘presidential’."