Fourth Estate You Can’t Shame Donald Trump His brand is built on not having any to begin with.

Jack Shafer is POLITICO's senior media writer. Previously, Jack wrote a column about the press and politics for Reuters and before that worked at Slate as a columnist and as the site's deputy editor. He also edited two alternative weeklies, SF Weekly and Washington City Paper. His work has been published in The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, the Columbia Journalism Review, Foreign Affairs, The New Republic, BookForum and the op-ed page of The Wall Street Journal.

Ever since Donald Trump hit double-digits in the Republican primary polls, the press has labored to cover him less like a chicken-neck-biting carnival geek and more like a legitimate candidate. (Except, of course, for Huffington Post, which continues to pretend he doesn’t matter in the GOP race.) In recent weeks, the media’s fresh efforts have meant tracking his ever-changing policy stands, as David A. Fahrenthold did in the Washington Post. In today’s New York Times, Josh Barro valiantly attempts to pour “Trumpism” into moderate Republicanism, although he does apologize for the way the candidate’s immigration views spill out of the “moderate” container.

All such attempts to make Trump conform to traditional notions of consistency and ideology will fail from here to Election Day—and beyond, should we be blessed with a Trump presidency. Nor can Trump be forced to conform to the traditional notions behind a candidacy. Having no ideology to guide him beyond “greatness,” he’s not committed to any stand on any issue. Every position he takes is provisional, subject to immediate revision, so he never flip-flops in the usual sense. He’s equally happy to stake a position—like his support of the single-payer system in 1999—and then abandon it.


For Trump, the idea of a “campaign promise” doesn’t really apply. Oh, he’ll be happy to make promises, but we’ll all be better off to consider them as opening offers in negotiations, subject to revision and revocation. His promise to Republicans not to run as an independent as long as party leaders treat him “fairly” in the nomination process reveals the glassy surface he skates on. Who will determine whether or not he was treated fairly? Why, Trump, of course, making the promise no promise at all—only a starting point that frees him to do what he wants later.

Maintaining “ leverage,” to invoke one of his favorite words, comes the closest to an inviolable position for Trump. The lust for leverage exists wherever negotiations convene, but outside of arms control treaties nowhere does leverage matter more than in a real-estate negotiation. A real estate developer like Trump is often a human skyhook, needing to move millions in property and material without a place to fix his fulcrum. He must charm, exaggerate, and threaten not only those who oppose his development but his partners, his future tenants, and the government. One leverage point every developer must preserve is the ability to walk away if the deal starts to sour: Always have an exit option in place.

Real estate developers live by their wits. To succeed, a developer must be a good salesman, which means he must constantly overstate the quality of his project. The location: Fantastic! The architect: Huge! An award winner! The construction materials: None finer! The workmanship: Very classy! Sounds like Trump, doesn’t it? These superlatives can’t be considered lies. They’re corporate truths that help keep the game afloat. Nobody ever went broke in the real estate market as long as they could find customers who believed their exaggerations. The developer must know not only how to bullshit, but how to read the bullshit of others in his business. He must be flexible at all times—while also being firm. He must be able to diagnose bubbles in the market and make money spotting them. Finally, he must appreciate that values and conditions move daily, that his competitors and partners will stab him in the back if they must (a ruthlessness he must also curry) and not even the smartest guy in the industry wins every day. Like Trump or dislike him, he’s made the racket work for him.

And that’s exactly the racket he’s brought to the GOP race. Trump’s refusal to play the role of a traditional candidate gives his opponents fits. Yesterday, fellow presidential candidate Lindsey Graham compared Trump to the Wizard of Oz, telling the Des Moines Register that there was nothing behind his curtain, and that voters would soon grow wise to his “gibberish” and “nonsensical” positions on immigration and seizing Iraq oilfields. This view, which many in the press share, holds that Trump draws most of his support from the uneducated, and once a vetting press and political rivals instruct the masses about Trump’s policy shortcomings, he’ll wither and blow away. But Graham misjudges the Trump mercury method: Never fully vesting in a policy prescription, he’s open to flowing to a new position if moved by a whim. When market conditions change, he’ll change too.

Wayne Barrett, who has functioned as Trump’s Boswell over the decades, captured his man’s capriciousness in his 1992 book, Trump: The Deals and the Downfall. Trump, Barrett wrote, has no “patience with the past or interest in the future,” going on to quote an unnamed intimate of Trump’s on that score. “He is the most present human being I ever met,” the source said. “He lives entirely in the moment. … He defines himself and redefines himself from day to day by what happens in his life.” Keeping everything in flux, acting on impulse and waiting for the moment of maximum advantage gives Trump his edge—in business and, now, in politics.

This ability to wipe yesterday’s slate clean but suffer little political damage makes Trump a political Terminator, all but impossible for other candidates to destroy. Even when crossing the standard boundaries—criticizing the war record of John McCain; claiming African-American kids have “no spirit”; calling Mexican immigrants “criminals and rapists”; insisting on an apology from Megyn Kelly—Trump maintains his footing. You can’t shame a shameless man.

Is Trump really invulnerable to scrutiny? At some point, maybe soon, the opposition researchers will trundle into newsrooms bearing their binders of damaging info. But what can they do to Trump? Opposition research works best when it either amplifies the negative preconceived notions the public holds about a candidate or hammers their positives. So far, Trump has remained immune to these sorts of revelations. Could, perhaps, an oppo researcher damage the Trump reputation by revealing that he’s actually a mild-mannered, pious, faithful, frugal, scholarly guy with impeccable taste in all things material and that all the bombast is for show?

Nah, but it’s fun to speculate. Politicians have always been difficult hard beasts to slay. Is there an old business deal or a fragment from an old lawsuit that might undo him? According to the old cliché, a pol can survive anything short of being caught in bed with a dead woman or a live boy. I’ll wager that if Trump were found in bed with a dead woman and a live boy, he could find a way to shrug that off, too. Can’t you almost hear him? “Excuse me! Excuse me! I’m running for president. Can I have some privacy here? Want a helicopter ride?”

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Or a dead boy and a live woman? What would shame Trump out of the race? Send your thoughts via email to [email protected] . My email alerts , Twitter feed, and RSS feed are all filled with shame, everlasting shame.

Correction: This piece originally misattributed a comment about overspending on women's health to Trump.