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http://www.wsj.com/articles/donald-trump-among-the-canaries-1455148607" Donald Trump Among the Canaries
Trump owns persona. His opponents have to go after him on policy and substance. "
By
Daniel Henninger
" The one reliably true thing we are witnessing in this 2016 election season is a bipartisan repudiation of Barack Obama’s presidency.
When Democratic voters in Iowa and New Hampshire vote for a socialist senator because 79% of them say they are worried about the direction of the economy, the incumbent president’s seven years in office takes the fall.
When Republican voters make clear that their state of angst and anger is such that they will cast their unhappy lot with Donald Trump, that reflects disgust with Barack Obama’s conduct of the American presidency.
This isn’t raised merely to throw sand on Mr. Obama’s last year. It is more serious than that. New Hampshire’s voters, all present for the Obama experience, are the canaries in the coal mines of American political life.
Just as dying canaries warned coal workers that the shaft was filling with toxic gases, New Hampshire’s voters have told the political status quo, to coin a phrase, you are killing us.
Donald Trump owns the 35% of the Republican electorate that is hacked off about everything. In nearly every exit-poll category—age, ideology, the economy, terror—Mr. Trump has at least 35% secured.
What this means for the other candidates is they cannot possibly compete with Donald Trump on his terms, on display in his victory speech Tuesday, which began contained and ended semi-unhinged.
A story from the political past will illustrate. In 1958, when George Wallace, then considered something of a Southern liberal, lost the Alabama governorship to a segregationist candidate, he remarked, “I will never be out-segged again.” Wallace became the premier angry-man populist of his era, running in four presidential races.
No one is going to out-rant Donald Trump about the state of America. Chris Christie got in as the tough-guy candidate. He’s gone, unable to compete with the Marvel Comics character Donald Trump created.
Ted Cruz especially had better reflect. Mr. Cruz’s path to the nomination runs through the Southern states and leans heavily on evocative rhetoric and buzzwords—primarily immigration and attacking Washington and “them.”
But Donald Trump owns all of that, and will so long as four or five candidates are dispersing the other 65% of the GOP vote. Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio have the money and mutual animosity to go on. Ben Carson won’t quit. John Kasich is talking about winning Michigan—in a month.
If Mr. Trump’s persona is impermeable, the other candidates will have to go after him on substance.
Mr. Trump has been floating in an inch-deep pool of policy and shows no inclination to expand his pre-existing knowledge of anything. It will require patience and persistence, but his opponents have no choice but to start challenging the implications of what he says and criticizing it in detail.
At the core of the Trump campaign is one policy idea: imposing a 45% tariff on goods imported from China. In his shouted, red-faced victory speech Tuesday, he extended the trade offensive to Japan and Mexico.
Some detail: Combining the value of goods we sell to them and they to us, China, Mexico and Japan are the U.S’s Nos. 1, 3 and 4 trading partners (Canada is No. 2). They are 35% of the U.S.’s trade activity with the world. The total annual value of what U.S. producers—and of course the workers they employ—sell to those three countries is $415 billion.
Wal-Mart has 1.4 million U.S. employees in stores filled with foreign-made consumer goods. With a 45% price increase, many won’t be working for long.
Mr. Trump says the threat alone of a tariff will cause China to cave. Someone should ask: What happens if they don’t cave? Incidentally, unlike Mexico, China has between 200 and 300 nuclear warheads and 2.4 million active-duty forces. Irrelevant?
He said Tuesday about drugs: “We’re going to end it at the southern border. It’s gonna be over.” How?
He said: “I am going to be the greatest jobs president that God ever created.” How?
Another campaign venue Donald Trump owns is the national debates. In New Hampshire, 67% said the debates were important to their decision, suggesting the debates are backing out retail politics. If so, the survivor candidates need a new debate strategy.
They will always finish behind Donald Trump if they let the moderators design their performances by making the debate a pinball machine, as ABC did in New Hampshire. The randomness, baiting and irrelevance (immigration, the inevitable debate whipping post is the lowest-rated issue in exit polls) make it hard for voters to shape an impression beyond persona, which Mr. Trump owns.
Iowa and New Hampshire revealed there are three GOP voting issues in the primaries: economic anxiety, Islamic terrorism and voters’ emotional belief in their candidate. A competitive Trump opponent will find a way to drive those subjects—and ignore the rest—across two hours in 30 to 60-second increments.
Donald J. Trump reinvented modern media politics. Somebody has about three months to reinvent his invention. "
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