Look Out for the Trump Pivot!

The “pivot” is a timely example. It refers to the expectation that at some point a leading presidential candidate will transform himself into a more suitable version of a likely nominee. He will “pivot” his attention away from his hard-core base of loyalists in favor of the broader general electorate. He will, in Trump’s case, scale back his hell-raiser, insult-monger bit and become more “presidential.” No doubt Trump’s pivot will be beautiful and be instantly recognized as one of the great pivots of all time.

.. But there is also something openly absurd about the concept of a Trump pivot. Certainly he is capable of changing his views — often and with breathtaking speed. But really, how do you pivot away from saying that Mexican s are rapists? (Will he negotiate “great deals” with more moderate Mexican rapists?) If your campaign is a cult of personality, how can you modulate that personality and still have the cult?

.. “Nothing makes Trump more acceptable today than yesterday or last week – or six months ago,” the Washington Post columnist Kathleen Parker wrote this month. “He is still a boastful, volatile, misogynistic, race-baiting, willfully and strategically ignorant, exploitative fear-monger who is guided by profit over principle, and whose hair-trigger temperament has the world on edge.”

.. But Trump follows no such rules, cardinal, unwritten or otherwise. That’s part of the perverse beauty of him. He can be breathtakingly forthcoming about the scam he is attempting to put over. “At the right time, I will be so presidential that you’ll call me and you’ll say, ‘Donald, you have to stop that, it’s too much,’” Trump told Sean Hannity last week. “I can be presidential,” he concluded.