Horowitz: Romney’s Trump Take-Down is Having an Impact
Tuesday, March 08, 2016
The impact of Romney’s speech could be seen at Thursday night’s Republican debate, where the moderators and other candidates echoed many of its themes. Admittedly, debates are not Donald Trump’s strong suit. But he had had a particularly bad night, looking testy and defensive and truly flailing when pushed by Cruz and Rubio to explain how his plan to replace Obamacare would work..The highlight was Megyn Kelly putting excerpts from court decisions on the screen for everyone to see to show that Trump’s defenses of Trump University’s practices were pretty much fact-free. Any one who watched that exchange, who was not a strong Trump supporter, came away thinking that Trump University was the scam Trump opponents and the New York Attorney General say it is.
Romney’s speech and follow-up media activities were in all likelihood one of the contributing factors to Trump’s less than impressive performance in the four contests held on Saturday. Ted Cruz garnered more total delegates than Trump, defeating him by more than 2-to-1 in Kansas, beating him handily in Maine, and losing narrowly to Trump in Louisiana and Kentucky. Tellingly, while Trump won convincingly in Louisiana among people that participated in early voting, Cruz narrowly defeated Trump among the voters that cast their ballot on Saturday. It is the case that 3-out-of-4 of these contests were caucuses where Trump does not tend to perform as well and all of the contests, including the Louisiana primary, were open only to registered Republicans, preventing Trump from benefiting from his appeal to some registered Independents and Democrats. Even with those caveats, however, Mitt Romney's observation about Saturday’s results on Fox News: “That’s because people are starting to take a better look at Donald Trump.” is still on target.
Of all the powerful points made in Romney’s speech, the one that goes to the heart of Trump’s brand and as a result has the most potential to damage him is that he doesn’t tell it like it is; in fact, he does just the opposite. Romney remarked, “Trump’s hallmark is dishonesty. Later in the speech, he said, “There’s plenty of evidence that Mr. Trump is a con man, a fake.” This reinforces the accurate charges made by Rubio and Cruz about Trump’s ‘tenuous’ relationship to the truth And Trump’s fundamental untruthfulness is finally getting some traction.
Because most of Trump’s claims about himself, any one who opposes him and about policy are pretty much fact-free and he is shameless in his willingness to bend the truth, he had emerged pretty much unscathed even from tough interview questions. He simply lies and evades, counting on his ability to do so convincingly to get him through the moment, until the interviewer moves onto a new topic. So the fact that in 2015 PolitiFact awarded him with the ‘Lie of the Year’ rating more than 3-out-4 of the 77 statements of his they fact-checked mostly false, false or pants-on-fire hasn’t had the impact it should.
But now that Romney and Trump’s opponents are repeatedly pointing out his pervasive pattern of telling lies and tying it to some of his questionable business practices--ones that have resulted in real people being hurt-- this dynamic is beginning to change. Journalists and commentators are now following up on Trump University and other examples that drive the point home.
Trump calls to mind the famous quote by the novelist Mary McCarthy about the playwright Lillian Hellman: “Every thing she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and the." In Trump’s case, his untruths are mainly self-serving, designed to make him seem richer and smarter than he really is, to justify racially tinged policy proposals, and to smear his opponents.
In the end, this major character-flaw may be his undoing, and if it is, Mitt Romney will deserve a big share of the credit.
Rob Horowitz is a strategic and communications consultant who provides general consulting, public relations, direct mail services and polling for national and state issue organizations, various non-profits and elected officials and candidates. He is an Adjunct Professor of Political Science at the University of Rhode Island.
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