Fellow Patriot: The voluntary financial generosity of supporters like you keeps our hard-hitting analysis coming. Please support the 2024 Year-End Campaign today. Thank you for your support! —Nate Jackson, Managing Editor

May 6, 2016

Lots of Luck, Donald Trump

Now comes the hard part. Now comes the part where Donald Trump has to appeal to everyone in the U.S. Trump will rack up lots of easy votes in the fall with his rabid fan base — older grumpy white males and their spouses who want change but don’t really know or care if Trump is a Republican or a Democrat. But voters who want to make America great again by being mean to Latinos or by putting tariffs on air-conditioners and iPhones won’t add up to a majority.

Now comes the hard part.

Now comes the part where Donald Trump has to appeal to everyone in the U.S.

Trump will rack up lots of easy votes in the fall with his rabid fan base — older grumpy white males and their spouses who want change but don’t really know or care if Trump is a Republican or a Democrat.

But voters who want to make America great again by being mean to Latinos or by putting tariffs on air-conditioners and iPhones won’t add up to a majority.

If he wants to become president, Trump has to mend a lot of fences, say a lot of mea culpas and learn a bunch of important political and economic things.

Like manners. Like humility. Like gravitas.

And like making nice with the Bush/Cruz/Kasich conservatives he’s been insulting and demeaning with sophomoric cheap shots for the last year.

The presumptive Republican nominee should start his political fence-repair work by trying to win over a few million women voters.

It won’t be easy. Three-fourths of women think he’s a piece of dirt and wouldn’t vote for him if he was married to Hillary.

I don’t know what it’ll take, or even if it’s possible, but somehow Trump has to prove that deep down he is not the sexist boor he’s been playing on TV.

I know one thing he should not do — attack Hillary for enabling her lecherous husband Bill and attacking the women who say they were accosted by him.

That didn’t work in the 1990s. All it did was make independent women vote for Hillary or stay home.

Trump’s long march to victory over the Republican political establishment has been an amazing thing to watch — kind of like a TV miniseries where the bad guy never gets taken down in the end by the good guys.

For a year he’s made fools of the media pundits and mincemeat of the professional politicians of his party.

He’s the un-politician who broke all the rules of the primary game and won. That’s a big reason he got so many votes in so many states.

We wanted a Washington outsider. What we got was a salesman. He did and said whatever he had to do to make the sale to the Republican electorate.

As I tweeted earlier this week, the GOP is no longer the Party of Reagan, it’s the Party of Trump.

Where he takes Republicans from here is anyone’s guess, but it’s probably going to be one of the wilder political rides in modern American history.

If America gets lucky, Trump will hit his head on a tree limb and when he wakes up he’ll be a real conservative who runs on a platform of slashing government spending and abolishing the IRS.

Or maybe he’ll hire some economists who can teach him why tariffs are bad for America because they punish consumers and not corporations.

Or maybe someone will explain to him why building a 300-foot wall on the Mexican border and rounding up 11 million illegal immigrants is not how a free — and great – country should do immigration reform.

Trump will need everybody he can get to defeat Hillary.

Who he picks for vice president will be interesting, but it won’t really matter because we know people don’t vote for a president because they like the VP choice.

It could be Rubio or Kasich, because that would help him in Florida and Ohio. It could be a Latina woman like Nevada Governor Susana Martinez.

Or, knowing Trump, he might go outside the box and name one of his business partners we’ve never heard of. No one knows where he’s going to go until he goes there.

There is one thing I know for sure. If Trump becomes president he won’t be able to treat the members of the G-7 or the G-20 the same way he treated the GOP 17.

Copyright ©2016 Michael Reagan

Who We Are

The Patriot Post is a highly acclaimed weekday digest of news analysis, policy and opinion written from the heartland — as opposed to the MSM’s ubiquitous Beltway echo chambers — for grassroots leaders nationwide. More

What We Offer

On the Web

We provide solid conservative perspective on the most important issues, including analysis, opinion columns, headline summaries, memes, cartoons and much more.

Via Email

Choose our full-length Digest or our quick-reading Snapshot for a summary of important news. We also offer Cartoons & Memes on Monday and Alexander’s column on Wednesday.

Our Mission

The Patriot Post is steadfast in our mission to extend the endowment of Liberty to the next generation by advocating for individual rights and responsibilities, supporting the restoration of constitutional limits on government and the judiciary, and promoting free enterprise, national defense and traditional American values. We are a rock-solid conservative touchstone for the expanding ranks of grassroots Americans Patriots from all walks of life. Our mission and operation budgets are not financed by any political or special interest groups, and to protect our editorial integrity, we accept no advertising. We are sustained solely by you. Please support The Patriot Fund today!


The Patriot Post and Patriot Foundation Trust, in keeping with our Military Mission of Service to our uniformed service members and veterans, are proud to support and promote the National Medal of Honor Heritage Center, the Congressional Medal of Honor Society, both the Honoring the Sacrifice and Warrior Freedom Service Dogs aiding wounded veterans, the Tunnel to Towers Foundation, the National Veterans Entrepreneurship Program, the Folds of Honor outreach, and Officer Christian Fellowship, the Air University Foundation, and Naval War College Foundation, and the Naval Aviation Museum Foundation. "Greater love has no one than this, to lay down one's life for his friends." (John 15:13)

★ PUBLIUS ★

“Our cause is noble; it is the cause of mankind!” —George Washington

Please join us in prayer for our nation — that righteous leaders would rise and prevail and we would be united as Americans. Pray also for the protection of our Military Patriots, Veterans, First Responders, and their families. Please lift up your Patriot team and our mission to support and defend our Republic's Founding Principle of Liberty, that the fires of freedom would be ignited in the hearts and minds of our countrymen.

The Patriot Post is protected speech, as enumerated in the First Amendment and enforced by the Second Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America, in accordance with the endowed and unalienable Rights of All Mankind.

Copyright © 2024 The Patriot Post. All Rights Reserved.

The Patriot Post does not support Internet Explorer. We recommend installing the latest version of Microsoft Edge, Mozilla Firefox, or Google Chrome.