The Art of the Gaffe

Matt Latimer: “Time and again, Trump has survived what only a few years ago would have been considered career-ending gaffes… This defies all the rules of public life as we’ve come to understand them. For decades, a single spontaneous outburst (John Kerry’s ‘I was for it before I was against it’), a pompous proclamation (whatever Al Gore intended to say about his role in the Internet), a cuckoo pronouncement (George Romney’s claim to have been ‘brainwashed’ about the Vietnam War), or even an embarrassing misspelling (Dan Quayle’s infamous attempt to correctly write the word ‘potato’ on a blackboard), caused irreparable, often campaign-ending damage.”

“Trump has done all these things—some of them multiple times in the same day. The gaffe hasn’t destroyed Trump; it’s made him stronger. The reasons for this are instructive, and they will change the way politics is practiced forever.”