Does Trump Have a Second Act?

Ryan Lizza: “Trump realized all of this and he has had a great first act. But Wednesday night’s debate suggested that he has no plan for a second act. First acts are famously easy to pull off.”

“The struggle of the second act in a political campaign, as in any drama, is that the problem identified at the beginning—the one that seized our attention—must be translated into the more mundane tasks that propel the protagonist toward his or her goal. Won’t even the most committed Trump supporter start to wonder why this self-proclaimed savior hasn’t prepared himself to answer standard policy questions? Will Trump build a staff and campaign infrastructure in Iowa and New Hampshire to handle all the dull mechanics of finding voters and getting them to the polls? Again, Obama’s historic 2008 campaign is a good point of comparison: the vague promise of ‘hope and change’ was married to an enormously sophisticated national operation that tended to the mechanics of winning the delegates needed to capture his party’s nomination.”