This week I predict we will begin to see the media meme that Donald Trump is “the comeback kid.”
He has already inched back up a fraction in the LA Times daily tracking poll.
I still find it highly unlikely he can win because his earlier outrages against decency and sanity have imprinted themselves too deeply in the public’s “lizard brain” (located somewhere in the human southern hemisphere where is is activated only with a kick) to be entirely erased when people enter the voting booth.
However, apologies—though he never used the word or specified whom he offended or defamed—play well, especially according to the pollsters with women. The analogy is with an open wound. The apology doesn’t heal it, but it is like a salve reducing the irritant. It may be significant that the “apology speech” idea was the brainchild of his new campaign manager, pollster Kellyanne Conway.
Do “great men” express regrets? These days, popes and presidents routinely do. Historically, it is rarer, though Lincoln is said to have remarked that a statesman never keeps bad promises. Is that the same thing? I think not. Rather, it is an honest change of mind.
Trump apologists like David Horowitz—who calls people like publisher Bill Kristol who detest Trump “renegade Jews”—are calling Trump’s new tone Lincolnian or even Churchillian. As far as I know, Churchill never apologized for his sentimental mistake is urging Hitler fan, Edward VIII, later Duke of Windsor, not to abdicate as King of England, for deciding to marry American divorcee, Wallace Warfield Simpson. Yet Churchill, who very early on did not see what a major threat Hitler was, quickly learned how wrong he had been and never deviated from his clear-eyed ringing of the democracy’s alarm bells against the Fuhrer incessantly forever after.
Hitler, on the other hand, apologized–sort of–in Mein Kampf for not recognizing immediately as a young man in Vienna how great a menace were the kaftan-clad Jews he encountered on the streets.
Trump is a weather vane with prejudices and vanities, not opinions, much less convictions, who is easily manipulated by a cunning former KGB flatterer like Putin.
If by some historic fluke, lubricated by anti-Hillary misogyny, the American public actually elects Trump, it will prove both Lincoln and Churchill wrong—about democracy as the best form of government among alternatives.
