Hillary Turns Trump into Mitt Romney
What does Donald Trump call business? His livelihood is the rationale for his candidacy—“that the basic function of the government is deals. And you need a president who can do deals. And he has a record of doing deals,” as Michael Kinsley put it—and yet his particular idea of business had not, until last night, been discussed much during this campaign season. His Republican adversaries in the primaries had spent careers celebrating the virtues of capitalism; during the general election, some rigorous early scrutiny of his finances faded when it became obvious that, even if he wasn’t as rich as he claimed, he was still very rich. Last night, Clinton, with Trump’s help, sharpened the portrait of Trump the plutocrat. “The wealthy are going to create tremendous jobs,” Trump insisted, in trying to explain why tax cuts for the richest Americans would be good for those who had been left behind. The billionaire acknowledged that in some years he had not paid taxes, and said that, even if he had, “it would be squandered.” Hillary Clinton won this debate in many ways, but her attack on his ways of doing business cut the deepest: she Romneyed him.
.. He bragged about opening a private club in Palm Beach (“a tough community”) that included African-Americans and Latinos, as if that insulated him against all charges of racism. He seemed basically resistant to the notion that he had some obligation to contribute to the public good.
.. When George W. Bush (“the M.B.A. President”) and Mitt Romney ran on their business records, the proposition was that business provided a theory of how the world worked and how executives ought to behave.
.. One gift of this debate to Clinton’s party is that he now looks like a much more familiar target: a rich guy who is out for himself.