Matt Latimer is a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush. He is currently a co-partner in Javelin, a literary agency and communications firm based in Alexandria, and contributing editor at Politico Magazine.

That Donald Trump’s campaign has had more returns from the dead than a soap opera villain is hardly a novel observation. What is noteworthy is the manner in which he’s bounced back. Time and again, Trump has survived what only a few years ago would have been considered career-ending gaffes—from calling women “pigs,” to boasting about his sexual prowess, to repeatedly insulting war heroes, to offending Mexicans during his off-the-cuff announcement speech, to misspelling basic vocabulary words like “lightweight” and “honor” on his Twitter feed. This is a man, after all, who forged his political identity by questioning loudly, without any real evidence, on multiple occasions, and in defiance of every rule of politics, the place of President Obama’s birth. And yet here he stands—one or two battleground states away from the White House.

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.


At one level, Trump’s survival, so far, is less a testament to his shrewdness—though it is a disservice to claim he hasn’t been shrewd—than it is to Washington’s studied cowardice. Trump is not only making gaffes, he’s brashly owning them, daring the political gods to smite him in what has become an epic rebuke to the dull, predictable, cautious political culture that everyone outside the Beltway has learned to recognize and abhor. In terror of the gaffe, candidates have increasingly immersed their true selves behind carefully vetted talking points, anodyne scripts, and cynical consultants, all with the primary purpose of suffocating in its cradle anything approaching a cavalier statement, never mind a surprising or provocative thought.

The culmination of this effort is before us: the enthusiasm-starved campaign of Hillary Clinton, who over her decades in politics has perfected the talent of making even the most cutting-edge idea immediately sound like a cliche. Set against this apotheosis of safe, gaffe-free politics, millions have delightedly embraced a man who seems to recognize their appetite for something recognizably real, even if it’s vulgar and offensive. His gaffes aren’t a sideshow: they’re integral to his pitch. For this cohort, a vote for Trump is a vote to make the safe, protected, consultant-scripted lives of everyone in D.C. miserable every single day, because they’ve earned it.

The larger explanation for the Trump phenomenon is even more unsettling for Washington’s political class, especially the media. They have lost their power. Only a decade or two ago, the media world was confined to a group of people in D.C. and New York—a group that largely knew each other, mingled in the same places, vacationed in the same locales. The most influential members of the group routinely defined what constituted a gaffe, others echoed that view, and it became the conventional wisdom for the rest of America. In the age of the Internet, with bloggers spread out across the nation, and multiple platforms across the political spectrum, that’s no longer possible. The growing divergence between these “insiders” and the new “outsiders” has played to Trump’s benefit, every single time he made what was once conceived as a “game-changing” error.

The first test of this new dynamic arrived on Trump Day One, when the candidate tossed aside a prepared announcement speech that would have made him sound, well, normal, in favor of a stream-of-consciousness ramble that began with an anecdote about candidates “sweating like dogs,” who were somehow incapable of beating ISIS to claiming that Mexico, in some diabolical frenzy, was shipping rapists and ax murderers to America by the dozens. Commenting that “the U.S. has become a dumping ground for everybody else's problems,” he quickly trained his ire on the influx of illegal immigrants across the Mexican border. He claimed that Mexico, presumably the government of Mexico, was “sending people that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems with us. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.” Most candidates, of course, know as a general rule that it’s rarely a good idea to include the name of an ethnic group and the word “rapists” in the same sentence. Trump either didn’t know this rule, didn’t appreciate what he was saying in the midst of a full ramble, or didn’t care.

The “insider” media went to work, claiming that Trump had insulted not only all Mexicans, but all immigrants. (This was an exaggeration.) Boycotts ensued. Trump lost his deals with Macy’s and NBC.

The “outsider” view was very different. Time and again, Republican voters have told their political leaders that illegal immigration was a major concern. The issue led to a rare uprising against George W. Bush during his second term when he pushed what many of his base considered “amnesty,” almost derailed John McCain’s presidential campaign in 2008, and haunted Marco Rubio throughout 2016. But most GOP leaders, believing “comprehensive immigration reform” was the key to attracting Hispanic voters, didn’t get it. They ignored their core voters on the issue. Trump sounded as perplexed and angry as they were. What he said wasn’t a gaffe, not to them. It showed he was listening—a skill Washington lost many election cycles ago. This pattern has repeated itself ever since.

If you were a campaign consultant looking to the future, it would be worth studying Trump’s “gaffes”—not to avoid them, but to figure out just why they work so well. If you list them and pick them apart, you could start to see them as a playbook for a new kind of anti-Washington politics, one in which the candidate speaks right past the old “insider” audience of media and Beltway elites, and delivers an outsider electorate exactly what it had been waiting to hear. Here’s how it works, in three examples:

1. Ben Carson the “Psychopath”

On the campaign trial, Trump cites Ben Carson’s acclaimed memoir, which discusses Carson’s violent temper during his youth. (Carson is currently threatening Trump’s front-runner status in polls.) “It's in the book that he's got a pathological temper," Trump tells an interviewer. "That's a big problem because you don't cure that ... as an example: child molesting. You don't cure these people. You don't cure a child molester. There's no cure for it. Pathological, there's no cure for that."

Insider: Trump destroys himself and permanently alienates Carson and his supporters by comparing Carson to a child molester. (Which Trump, arguably, didn’t exactly do.)

Outsider: Trump is a fighter, willing to use Carson’s own words directly against him. The media does this to politicians all the time. What’s the big deal?

Outcome: Trump overtakes Carson in polls. Carson ultimately forgives Trump, endorses him for president and serves as a surrogate for him—except when Carson needs to find his luggage. TRUMP WIN

2. McCain the “Captured” War Hero

At an Iowa event in June 2015, Trump outrageously questions John McCain’s war hero status (after McCain went after Trump supporters as “crazies.”) “He’s not a war hero,” said Trump, before immediately reversing himself. “He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.”

Insider View: We all know John McCain—great guy, war hero, very quotable. Who in their right mind would take on a POW who endured torture for more than five years in his nation’s service, especially a guy who never served in uniform himself? Proof positive that Trump’s nuts.

Outsider View: Trump probably went too far on this, but many of us don’t like amnesty-supporting McCain all that much anyway. Besides, McCain was taking cracks at Trump. Why shouldn’t he respond?

Outcome: Eventually, after much resistance, Trump quasi-apologizes by claiming he didn’t say what he obviously meant to say. McCain endorses Trump for the presidency. TRUMP WIN

3. Bush the Warmonger

Fresh off of his victory in New Hampshire, Trump heads to South Carolina, the alleged Bush “firewall” where his brother, George W. Bush, is going to campaign for his brother Jeb. During a televised debate in the veteran-thick state, Trump says W. “lied” about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq in order to go to war: “They said there were weapons of mass destruction, there were none. And they knew there were none.” He is greeted with boos from the audience.

Insiders: South Carolina veterans will not forgive Trump for insulting the Bushes or repeating the left’s claims that Bush lied the country into war. We’ve been assured all year long by Bush campaign people that Jeb was going to win in South Carolina, a state with nostalgic love for the Bushes. Trump made a huge miscalculation with his latest outburst.

Outsiders: The Bushes are yesterday’s news. And, come to think of it, why did we go into Iraq?

Outcome: Trump wins the South Carolina primary by about 10 points. Bush comes in fourth and drops out of the race. TRUMP WIN

Care to continue? I didn’t think so. And I still haven’t gotten to how Trump wondered aloud whether Ted Cruz’s dad may have been in or near the grassy knoll the day of the Kennedy assassination—nor to Trump’s brilliant response when called on his epic troll: “They didn’t deny it.”

By the time Trump gaffed his way to the Republican nomination, furious and frustrated media outlets had been grappling for months with how to hold him to account, as they’ve managed with other candidates in the past. A journalist asked Trump to identify the “five sources” that he claimed had told him Mexico was deliberately sending criminals across our border. The brilliance, of course, was in the number. Not one. Not two. But five people. Who would make up a number like that? In any event, Trump refused to disclose their names. Were they business colleagues? Informants from the Mexican government? Did all of them have the last name Trump? We’re left to wonder. Most people didn’t seem to care. He’s probably making it up, they think, but whatever.

Multiple Web pages and assorted news articles have devoted themselves to chronicling Trump’s habit of making an outrageous statement, and then later denying such statement was ever made. Examples abound: that Marco Rubio was the personal senator for Mark Zuckerberg, that the pro-free-market Trump had supported health care mandates, that he ever told supporters to “knock the crap” out of protesters, after some did just that. Trump’s infuriating ability to wiggle out of all sorts of statements has left fact-checkers—who have labeled him among the biggest fibbers in recent political history—in a state of distress. After all, a decades-long pattern of denying clear and unequivocal statements is the kind of audacity usually reserved for the Clintons. Which, come to think of it, may be why Trump’s dalliances with deception hasn’t seem to outrage people who don’t work in the media.

The latest effort is the Instant Fact Check—in which cable news channels, such as CNN, note in real-time whether a candidate is making a truthful claim, as in “Trump (falsely) claims X.” One doesn’t get the impression that these “instant” fact-checks have been applied quite so forcefully to Hillary Clinton. And this, too, seems to have blown up in their collective faces, signaling to outsiders that the mainstream media, as they suspected, is just in the tank for the Democrats.

In the years-long battle between Trump and his Javert-like media interlocutors, nothing has led to more perfectly justified hysteria than his pirouette over the Obama birther business. As far as conspiracy theories go, the rock-solid contention that Barack Obama was not born in the United States was always of the nonsensical variety. After all, even if he had been born someplace else, no fault of his own, the president still would have been born to an American citizen, his mother. That alone would qualify him for the presidency, just as much as it does Cruz, or McCain, or George Romney (all of whom were not born in the U.S.) But the dark and daffy corners of the so-called alt-right is no place for logic.

Last week, as he began passing Clinton in many polls, Trump seemed to have fallen prey to the “birther” gaffe again by refusing to say whether he believed the president was born in the United States. Media outlets could not believe their luck—Trump was stepping into it again. Or was he? At a news conference devoted to promoting his new D.C. hotel, Trump finally announced his (latest) position: “Hillary Clinton and her campaign of 2008 started the birther controversy. I finished it. President Barack Obama was born in the United States, period.”

This was Trump at his most fiendish. Not only had he repudiated his own long history as a “birther,” not only had he lured the national news media into giving wall-to-wall coverage of a hotel opening, he blamed his opponent for the whole thing. No other activity in recent political history engendered as much of an outcry from the insider media, with the possible exception of Sarah Palin’s nomination for the vice presidency of the United States.

To the insiders, no single moment in the campaign was more appalling, or revealing of Trump’s singular mendacity. His pirouette not only made fools of the press by getting them to cover an infomercial disguised as a news conference, it was a brazen effort to shift blame for a controversy that Trump did more than any other prominent American to promote. Surely, the press assumed, the public would see this? They saw it, all right—but not in the same way.

To an outsider, a savvy businessman had just engineered a brilliant ad for his latest venture, while efficiently backing away from a controversy he probably didn’t take all that seriously anyway. And as he did it, he left the media caught just a bit in a trap of its own. As they rushed to attack Trump on his latest “lie,” most outlets conveniently omitted to mention that in fact there was some truth in Trump’s contention. The Clinton campaign may not have “started” the birther controversy. But it was circulated by her supporters, and Clinton world definitely had a hand in it. According to a former editor with the McClatchy News Service, one of Clinton’s closest confidants, Sidney Blumenthal, personally spread the “birther” story himself. (Blumenthal flatly calls this “false,” leaving the story in “his word against mine” territory.)

What an unbiased observer might conclude from all of this is that many mainstream media outlets, so blinded in their distaste for Trump and so determined to unmask him as an unprecedented liar, have now compromised themselves in the process. Which is one more lesson from the Trump playbook: If you make enough gaffes, pretty soon your crazed critics will start making gaffes of their own.