There are so many good reasons for Conservatives to laugh off the prospect of Kevin O’Leary as their leader.
He does not appear to be terribly conservative, other than on some fiscal matters. His knowledge of how this country’s government works appears rudimentary at best. He has been the only candidate to duck debates in which he might have to attempt both official languages. His commitment to their party is so minimal, he has not bothered to move back to Canada full-time while running for its leadership, and not committed to seek a seat in Parliament if he wins.
.. If anything, he seems the sort of candidate – from outside the party’s mainstream culture, contemptuous of other politicians and liable to quarrel with caucus – to which a party might turn if it’s fallen on such hard times that it’s ready to blow things up. But the Conservatives have lost one election, not in terribly devastating fashion, after holding power nearly a decade.
.. They think he’ll beat (or at least beat up) Justin Trudeau
The most common explanation for Mr. O’Leary’s appeal revolves around antipathy toward the current Prime Minister so great among some Conservatives that it outweighs any policy-related priorities for their own party.
.. Loud and brash, he’s fashioned himself a tough guy spoiling for a fight with a rival he portrays – and many Conservatives see – as soft and ineffectual.
.. To some Conservatives, there has been too much politeness toward Mr. Trudeau from their side of the aisle – and Mr. O’Leary’s caricaturing of the PM as an air-headed “surfer dude” who serves as a front for his nefarious best friend Gerald Butts suggests he’d at least kick Mr. Trudeau in the teeth the way they’d like to do themselves.
.. Canadians used to buy tickets to see Mr. O’Leary, famous for judging business pitches on the reality shows Dragons’ Den and Shark Tank, work the speaking circuit.
.. Even more helpful is a social-media following, including more than 600,000 Twitter users, that allowed him to enter the race with an usually large list of targets.
.. a rival campaign organizer pointed to Mr. O’Leary portraying himself as the sort of success story – a self-made, risk-taking millionaire – that plays especially well with fiscal conservatives.
.. And again, comparisons with Mr. Trudeau enter play, with some Conservatives believing the best way to counter a celebrity Prime Minister is with a celebrity of their own – and with his campaign casting him as someone able to break through with millennials the way other Tories can’t.
.. He’s able to cut through the drone
In a leadership campaign with an unprecedented number of candidates, standing out from the pack is a bigger challenge than usual.
.. Even without opening his mouth, he’s so different in image and experience as to be easily distinguishable. And when he does talk, Mr. O’Leary’s television skills – his confident, concise, catchphrase-heavy manner of presenting himself – pierces the noise.
The Magic of Donald Trump
The Apprentice debuted on NBC in 2004 with 20.7 million viewers, ranking it seventh among all primetime programs.
.. Did tens of millions ever cast their eyes on the junior senators from Florida or Kentucky or Texas, or the governor of Ohio, not to mention the ex-governors of Arkansas or Florida, or the ex-CEO of Hewlett Packard, before they chanced to mount the stage for a debate with Donald J. Trump last August, a television event that drew the unheard-of viewership of 24 million? Those 24 million tuned in to see Trump.
.. In the casually corrupt American political system the candidates serve as bagmen carrying cash from the corporations to the networks.
.. What other candidate is allowed to call in to morning shows or the sacred Sunday shows for television “interviews” whenever he pleases?
.. this in large part relies on the carefully cultivated illusion that it is all off the cuff, that it comes from the heart and that on a given day he might indeed say anything
.. So they have a choice: They can pretend some impossible solution is actually going to happen, or they can listen to the person who has proved that he can solve problems.
.. as the height of monomania. One can find, in any speech or tweet, more concentrated versions, for example this tweet on Easter Sunday: “Another radical Islamic attack, this time in Pakistan, targeting Christian women & children. At least 67 dead, 400 injured. I alone can solve.”
.. Ignorance and narcissism are joined together here, surely, but they are fortified by the very fact of the amazing events of the last ten months.
- He hired no pollster.
- He spent relatively little money, bought few ads.
- He promulgated few policies.
- He merely flew on his own plane from city to city, from arena to arena, talking about himself—about how the country “has big problems” and how only he can solve them
Who is there to contradict his claim that “there’s nobody like me. Nobody”?
.. These “exceptional powers or qualities” include not just the reputed business genius—a mysterious power that makes the promulgation of specific policies redundant—but the ability to tell a story about why “our country is in big trouble” that is simple, convincing, and satisfying.
.. “Our leaders are so incompetent,”
.. turning on its head the entire drift of post–World War II American propaganda that said the country acted to rebuild Europe and protect the free world not out of national self-interest but out of good old exceptional American generosity.
.. As he declared last November about waterboarding terrorists, “You bet your ass I would!… It works…. If it doesn’t work they deserve it anyway for what they’re doing!
..
certain European leaders of the 1930s would have recognized. The sense of threat from the Other—whether it be Mexican rapists swarming over the border or Muslim terrorists posing as refugees or “two young bullies cursing and threatening”; the sense of national decline that this signals (“We don’t win any more…”); the clear path to a restoration of greatness marked by simple, autocratic solutions (imposing tariffs, pulling out of NATO, bringing back torture, “bombing the shit” out of ISIS)—all of it springs from the populist toolbox, if not the fascist one, and the advertisements show that the roots of these positions and attitudes run very deep.
.. “fascinating intersection of celebrity and neo-fascism”
.. Trumpism is partly the child of the 2008 Wall Street collapse and the vast sense of political corruption and self-dealing it brought in its wake: the sense that the country was looted on a vast scale and that the politicians of all stripes made sure the criminals were not punished.
.. anger at and fear of the Other—illegal immigrants, Muslim refugees, an African-American and possibly Muslim president who seems in league with both—that Trump has skillfully cultivated.
.. Again and again when I asked rally-goers why they supported Trump I heard the word “honesty.” “He doesn’t slip and slide like all the others,” a retired accountant in his seventies told me. Or else: “I see strength in him, power. He’s not afraid to say what he thinks….” That he speaks clearly—that he is unafraid of the police of political correctness—itself bespeaks a power to cut through the corruption and the dealmaking, to fight and fight to get things done: to actually end illegal immigration, to actually repeal Obamacare. It suggests he has the sheer fighting power and energy to do what he says.
.. Rorty’s words prophesy not only the strongman’s rise but his blithe refusal to let “political correctness” prevent him making sexist and bigoted remarks, and his fans’ euphoric enjoyment of their hero’s reveling in the pleasures of free speech. He says what he wants: he is rich enough, strong enough, to do what he pleases.
.. So we started, and something happened called Paris. Paris happened, and Paris was a disaster. There’ve been many disasters but it was Paris and then we had a case in Los Angeles, in California
.. That this is a fact, and that Trump recognizes this fact, represents the greatest risk of that future that the political class still stubbornly refuses to take seriously
.. the longtime lobbyist and fixer Paul Manafort, confidentially assured Republican National Committee Members:
When he’s out on the stage,…he’s projecting an image that’s for that purpose…. He gets it. The part that he’s been playing is evolving into the part that now you’ve been expecting…. The negatives will come down. The image is going to change.
.. we are sure to be hearing a lot about “Crooked Hillary.” (“You have to brand people a certain way when they are your enemies,” he proclaimed to us at Boca. “You gotta brand people….”)
.. A President Trump could likely only emerge as a product of our own fears, carefully fostered as they have been ever since the airliners emerged out of that bright September sky one morning in 2001.
What Drives Donald Trump? Fear of Losing Status, Tapes Show
Why such a harsh judgment? Because in Mr. Trump’s eyes, Mr. Hall had suffered the most grievous form of public humiliation: His celebrity had waned. His star had dimmed.
.. The recordings reveal a man who is fixated on his own celebrity, anxious about losing his status and contemptuous of those who fall from grace. They capture the visceral pleasure he derives from fighting, his willful lack of interest in history, his reluctance to reflect on his life and his belief that most people do not deserve his respect.
In the interviews, Mr. Trump makes clear just how difficult it is for him to imagine — let alone accept — defeat.
“I never had a failure,” Mr. Trump said in one of the interviews, despite his repeated corporate bankruptcies and business setbacks, “because I always turned a failure into a success.”
.. “No, I don’t want to think about it,” he said when Mr. D’Antonio asked him to contemplate the meaning of his life. “I don’t like to analyze myself because I might not like what I see.”
.. Who does he look up to? “I don’t have heroes,” Mr. Trump said.
Does he examine history to better understand the present? “I don’t like talking about the past,” he said, later adding, “It’s all about the present and the future.”
.. Who earns his respect? “For the most part,” he said, “you can’t respect people because most people aren’t worthy of respect.”
.. But he always seems to return, in one form or another, to the theme of humiliation.
.. He reserves special scorn for people who embarrass themselves in front of their peers.
.. When people lose face, Mr. Trump’s reaction is swift and unforgiving.
And when Mr. Trump feels he has been made a fool of, his response can be volcanic. Ivana Trump told Mr. D’Antonio about a Colorado ski vacation she took with Mr. Trump soon after they began dating. The future Mrs. Trump had not told her boyfriend that she was an accomplished skier. As she recalls it, Mr. Trump went down the hill first and waited for her at the bottom:
IVANA TRUMP: So he goes and stops, and he says, “Come on, baby. Come on, baby.” I went up. I went two flips up in the air, two flips in front of him. I disappeared. Donald was so angry, he took off his skis, his ski boots, and walked up to the restaurant. … He could not take it. He could not take it.
.. But it was not enough for Mr. Trump to become an object of media fascination. He took pleasure in knowing that such coverage was denied to almost everybody else.
.. By the time he was an established businessman, Mr. Trump hired a service to compile the swelling number of references to him in the media, which he then reviewed. “There are thousands of them a day,” he told Mr. D’Antonio. “Thousands, thousands a day.”
.. Ultimately, Mr. Trump fears — more than anything else — being ignored, overlooked or irrelevant.
That’s how he saw Arsenio Hall in the 2000s, as forgotten and ungrateful for his time on “The Celebrity Apprentice,” Mr. Trump’s reality television competition, which Mr. Hall won in 2012.
.. But he quickly retreats from the moment, declining Mr. D’Antonio’s invitation to further explain how the song makes him feel about himself, saying he might not like what he discovers.
Trump’s Celebrity Shortage
“It’s very important to put some showbiz into a convention, otherwise people are going to fall asleep,” the man himself told The Washington Post.
The list is in, and the celebrities include pro golfer Natalie Gulbis, currently 484th in women’s world rankings, and Dana White, head of a big mixed martial arts organization. Plus Antonio Sabato Jr., former underwear model turned reality TV show regular. And a ton of members of the Trump family... Of course, none of us actually cares there aren’t going to be any quarterbacks at the Republican convention. But if Trump can’t negotiate some cheesy diversions, what makes anybody think he can negotiate a new trade deal with China?.. And by the way, were you curious about why Sarah Palin wasn’t coming to the convention? Easy answer. The Republican Party’s presumed presidential nominee says it’s because Alaska is too far from Cleveland... Pence is a social conservative who hews to the Paul Ryan vision of government — low taxes on the rich, free trade and a trimming of the Social Security safety net.