According to the last campaign finance filing, Mr. Trump had so far spent $2 million of his own money on his self-financed bid for office. That is a fraction of what other major campaigns have spent, and most of it has been spent reimbursing himself for the cost of his plane and office space in Trump Tower. When financial disclosure reports are made public next week, it is unlikely he will be shown to have invested much more.
What has helped keep Mr. Trump’s candidacy strong has been the intense news media coverage of his bid — that and the universal name recognition he enjoyed heading into the race and a fractured nominating field, with 15 candidates. Most candidates would give anything for the free airtime Mr. Trump gets — and lower-polling hopefuls like Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky have publicly complained about it.
Donald Trump’s Act Seems to Be Wearing Out Its Welcome
Though many of the mainstream outlets favored by the Republican establishment — most notably the editorial pages of The Wall Street Journal — have always greeted Mr. Trump’s candidacy with a critical, if not disdainful eye, that discomfort has spread to the news media that speak to the populist base of the Republican Party, whose anger at Washington has helped fuel Mr. Trump’s rise. Fox News opinion commentators no longer go on breathlessly about Mr. Trump’s antics, and conservative talk-radio programs have moved on to fawn over Ben Carson, Carly Fiorina and Senator Ted Cruz of Texas.
.. “What all the pro-Trump people don’t understand is that conservatives for the past 20 years have been preprogrammed to go beat Hillary Clinton, and if they perceive him as an obstacle to doing that, they’re going to move on,” he said.
.. But Mr. Beck’s interest in Mr. Trump appears to have cooled. He has had Mr. Carson, Mrs. Fiorina and Mr. Cruz on his nationally syndicated radio program, but said he no longer had any interest in “the circus” of hosting Mr. Trump.
.. Mr. Trump has tried to use being shunned in the news media to his advantage. But he may have hurt his chances of reaching his voter base when he instigated an on-again, off-again public feud with Fox News — the highest-rated cable TV channel in the country, which holds enormous sway over Republican primary voters — and its chairman and chief executive, Roger E. Ailes.
.. “If I were a betting man, I’d put money on Roger Ailes every time,” Mr. Beck said.
.. But, Mr. Ginsberg added, losing the conservative news media could have long-term ramifications for a Trump candidacy.
“Primary voters in states like Iowa or South Carolina or New Hampshire are going to get their cues from these outlets,” he said, “so Trump has really big issues he needs to look at here.”
Donald Trump’s Tax Plan Is a Predictable Cop-out
Why did I refer to this cop-out as predictable? Because I doubted all along that Trump had the depth and gumption to be a genuine American populist—a Huey Long for the Internet age. Such a figure, if he had channeled worries about immigration, ISIS, and national decline, then combined these with some seriously populist proposals designed to exploit resentment of corrupt financial and political élites, could perhaps have emerged as a genuinely potent and dangerous force. But Trump isn’t that guy. A self-satisfied showman and self-promoter rather than a real insurrectionary, he ultimately hasn’t got much to offer. This tax plan makes it painfully clear.
What Kind of Person Would Vote For Donald Trump? These People.
It’s still not clear whether he’s in on the joke—there’s always been a bit of mystery to how aware Donald Trump is that Donald Trump is full of shit. But when you see him in person, and you hear him claim that the term “Supreme Leader” would be more fitting for him than for the head of Iran, there is the tiniest hint that he knows what a ludicrous thing this is to say. Even his exaggerations are hilarious. He said this was the biggest crowd in state history, even though we were in a public-school auditorium. He said he was worth more than $10 billion, a figure that is impossible for him to prove but also impossible for us to disprove. He said he made $213 million from The Apprentice, a figure which NBC steadfastly refutes.
.. You can see why people think he’s more “honest” than one of the other randos in the GOP field—he’s gifted at not sounding like a politician even as he deploys standard tricks from the “I’m not a politician” handbook.
.. If Donald Trump has one undeniable virtue as a politician, it’s that he does not try to fake being one of us. He’s not going to the fucking Bowl-o-Rama on a Saturday night in a plaid shirt to prove he’s a man of the people. The whole thrust of The Donald’s campaign is that he is special. He is extraordinary.
.. And here is where my brief jag of mildly effusive praise for Donald Trump must come to an end, because the grim undercurrent of his rise is SHAME. After all, if you believe we must make America great again, then you must also believe that America, at the present moment, sucks. And pretty much everyone at the Trump picnic believed that America sucks. When I asked a group of Trump supporters outside if they were proud of America, they all laughed with derision. Of course they weren’t proud of America. Of course this nation is a shithole. One voter named Corey told me he hoped Trump would help America “get back to the way it was,” a refrain I heard from a lot of people, as if the country was a rock band that had changed its sound. Backing Trump means acknowledging that you live in a world of failure, and that your last best hope is the Music Man moseying into town.
.. Now, here is how Donald Trump says he will Make America Great Again™. In Trump’s worldview, politics is little more than series of deals to be made. Every complex global problem, or intractable adversary, can be tamed with sufficiently hard-ass steakhouse dealmaking. He explained it all in Osky:
“I know the greatest negotiators in the world,” he said. “Now some of these people are horrible human beings. You wouldn’t have them to dinner. They’re vicious. They’re crude. They’re unhappy. They treat everybody badly. Who cares? I want them negotiating against China. Think of Carl Icahn, a friend of mine. He’d be great. I’d say, ‘Carl, take China’.”