Donald Trump is so loud that he even shouts in print. Last Thursday, he tweeted: “They will soon be calling me MR. BREXIT!” He meant that he’ll defy the polls and pull off a surprise victory in November. That’s unlikely. It’s a safer bet that he won’t be called Mr President. The Republican presidential nominee’s tweet reflects a change of plan. In the primaries, there was no plan at all: He said the first thing that entered his head. It worked: He won the Republican nomination. But the shift from primaries to a general election requires moderation and Trump has struggled to fulfil a promise to be “so presidential that you people will be so bored”.
Instead, he insulted and argued and outraged — while privately complaining that Trump wasn’t allowed to be Trump enough any more. Last week, his campaign manager, Paul Manafort, was effectively demoted and one Steve Bannon replaced him. Bannon is a fascinating character. A former Goldman Sachs banker, he is the man behind Breitbart — a far-right news website that has been one of Trump’s few consistent supporters. It’s part of what is sometimes called the “alt-Right”, a coalition of conservatives in perpetual war against both the Left and the establishment Right.
The coalition counts sexists and neo-racists among its number. Some of Breitbart’s most arresting headlines include ‘Birth control makes women unattractive and crazy’ and ‘Young Muslims in the West are a ticking time bomb’. Breitbart has a United Kingdom bureau that is shameless, friendly to United Kingdom Independence Party and boasts Nigel Farage as a columnist. The conservatism of Mitt Romney was well-mannered, ethical. Breitbart’s people are political punks who, just like Sid Vicious, revel in being despised by the folks they despise. They have a reputation. Ben Shapiro, a former Breitbart editor, called Bannon: “A vindictive, nasty figure, infamous for verbally abusing supposed friends and threatening enemies.” In Shapiro’s view, “Bannon is a smarter version of Trump.”
So when Bannon joined the campaign, one expected Trump to go turbo. Perhaps extend that wall to keep out the Canadians, too? Instead, he offered what is being labelled an “apology” for his past behaviour. A very Trump apology: He delivered it without humility, shouting that, “believe it or not”, he regrets that sometimes people take offence at the things he says. Expect to hear more about this apology. Expect Trump to refer to it as “the most BEAUTIFUL apology ever given”! What the apology shows is that Bannon may be a maverick but, presuming he agreed with this manoeuvre, he is also clever. He and the rest of the staff can read polls: Trump is behind even in once-competitive states such as North Carolina and Florida. As one Republican insider put it to me, it’s too late to catch up. The new goal won’t be to overtake Hillary Clinton, but to get close enough — say just three points behind — to be within striking distance on polling day. That’s when the Brexit part of the strategy kicks in.
Trump’s people hope that Americans are lying to pollsters about their voting intentions — just as many Britons may have done during the referendum. Team Trump dreams of victory by stealth. The candidate may even think that he’s buying some of the genius behind Brexit. After all, one can draw a direct line from Bannon to Farage through the UK Breitbart branch, and the two men are reportedly close. But Brexit cannot be bought and imported. For a start, while Farage’s anti-immigration campaign was a key component of victory, it probably alienated as many as it seduced.
What was far more important was the endorsement of senior Tories and personable characters from Labour. It was a bipartisan movement based on an idea that, love or loathe, Euro-scepticism had been on the table for 40 years. Trump, by contrast, is brand new in political terms and fraught with far greater risk. Leaving the European Union is a single policy; Trump is a package. Americans are weighing up whether or not to give this guy the nuclear codes. Moreover, Brexit appealed to a coalition of middle-class Tories and working-class Labour supporters.
Trump is doing well among the blue-collar voters, but haemorrhaging white-collar Republicans. Swing-state polls show Trump losing college-educated whites, a group Romney won by 4 per cent in 2012. Brexit also did well in a few majority non-white areas, such as Slough. In some polls, Trump scores zero per cent among African-Americans. Trump’s hope to “do a Brexit” is rooted in a misunderstanding about what Brexit was. It was a less risky, less right-wing a choice than its opponents thought — far less so than the Trump candidacy is. And there’s no sign of a real pivot to where Trump needs to be to achieve Brexit’s breadth of support. His apology represents a change in tone, but it’s not just tone that puts off voters. It’s substance. Nothing will undo the things Trump has said about immigration, trade or terrorism. What it took to excite Breitbart readers and win the Republican primary has probably damned him in the opinion of everyone else.
— The Telegraph Group Limited, London, 2016
Tim Stanley is an English blogger, journalist and historian.
