Trump’s Campaign for Relevance

Matt Bai: “Trump himself doesn’t worry me. That’s because I don’t think for a moment that he wants the job. What Trump wants — craves, actually — is relevance. The man has a clinical phobia of obsolescence. He puts his name on every building he owns just to make sure people will have to speak it out loud.”

“He has no plan for actual governance and no ambition to actually govern. It’s possible that his daily barrage of insults and diatribes, each more outrageous than the last, is really a kind of self-sabotage, as if he’s trying to figure out how awful he can be before the show starts to lose viewers. Even if Trump managed to get the nomination (which he won’t), the broader electorate would recoil at the things he says, and he’s probably counting on it.”

“What does worry me is that Trump really is a proven visionary. He’s brilliant at seeing the next ego-leveraging opportunity. He’s the first interloping network star to jolt a presidential race, but no way is he the last… What Trump is doing, and it’s a twisted kind of public service, is showing all of us how easy it is now to successfully manipulate a media in economic distress and a presidential process that caters, more and more, to an ever-dwindling bloc of extremists on either side.”