Of course, the facts don’t matter to Trump. After all, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) became “Little Marco” despite his above-average height. Republican voters, predictably, came to regard him as too inexperienced for the job at hand.
Armed with Twitter and his nearly 60 million followers, Trump’s power lies in his language. Ridicule fires up the primal instincts of the conservative base. Trumpian insults are ruthless, but effective psychological warfare, capturing an opponent’s jugular weakness in one phrase – one never entirely unearned. As the Israeli writer Anshel Pfeffer recently wrote, [Trump] has “an uncanny ability to sense [his rival’s] weak spots and sniff out [his] voters’ inner fears.”
Trump’s opponents have so far struggled to respond. Elizabeth Warren—mocked as “Pocahontas”—undermined her presidential campaign with an embarrassing blood test to prove Native American descent. Trump bragged that “I’ve knocked her out of the race.” As he said, “I think Pocahontas, she’s finished, she’s out, she’s gone.” Warren response may have proved Trump right: she launched her campaign by releasing her DNA—and legitimizing his critiques.
View the complete July 7 article by Charles B. Blair on the National Memo website here.