It’s uncanny: just as GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump appears to have turned a corner in his effort to consolidate GOP support, on the one hand, while tempering his general behavior to attract wavering persuadeables open to ‘change’, on the other, Trump screws up.
But when it comes to Trump’s campaign trail rhetorical hi-jinx on any given day, “screwing up” is a subjective judgment.
But Trump’s lambasting and distorting the record of New Mexico GOP Governor Susanna Martinez while simultaneously ridiculing Mitt Romney for “walking like a penguin” is as politically foolish as it is juvenile.
After his big South Carolina win, Trump implied he’d be ‘more presidential’; he said the same after Indiana; he implied the same after bringing in Paul Manfort to ‘professionalize’ the campaign; Trump implied the same in the run-up and postscript to meeting Paul Ryan in Washington.
Each time, however, Trump reverts to… being himself.
Maybe it’s just a big put-on.
He knows he must meet the minimum credibility and behavioral thresholds to actually win — but he’s just waiting to do that at the convention; or at the fall debates, when Hillary and everyone else expects a patented Trump onslaught; or the last two weeks, when a small sliver of final voter decisions are being rendered.
Maybe Trump has this all figured out.
The odds are against that, but we shall see.