Every successful politician succeeds by acting, to some degree, by allowing themselves to look like a blank screen on which a wide range of voters can project their own hopes and dreams. The clumsier politicians risk the appearance of pandering. Smoother ones manage to simply stay vague enough to convince voters they’re with them, although that can cause problems later: Barack Obama campaigned as an inspirational liberal in 2008, only to disappoint many of his more progressive backers with an essentially moderate governing approach.
The Trump candidacy is a more unusual case, though. Seldom has a candidate run on such a clear set of policies, delivered so bluntly: He’s gonna build a wall. He’s gonna rip up trade agreements. He’s gonna stop Muslim immigration. He’s gonna beat China. Yet in spite of the directness of these promises—or perhaps because of them—quite a few of Trump’s supporters in the Republican Party insist that he doesn’t really mean what he says. [...]
There are some signs that Trump himself may not really believe these things, though. He told the editorial board of The New York Times that he uses the wall talk to inject enthusiasm into rallies when energy is flagging: “You know, if it gets a little boring, if I see people starting to sort of, maybe thinking about leaving, I can sort of tell the audience, I just say, ‘We will build the wall!’ and they go nuts.” BuzzFeed’s Ben Smith also reported that Trump told the board something that undermined a core tenet of his candidacy, though it wasn’t clear what. Did he say deportation wasn’t feasible? That the wall wouldn’t be built? The truth hasn’t emerged, but Trump did tell Fox News that “everything is negotiable,” not much of an assurance.
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