It's probably fair to say that every — not most, every — Republican strategist in Washington believes Trump will fade, or perhaps blow up, or in any event will not be the GOP nominee. Everything in their experience tells them he won't last. Which has led to the extraordinary scenario of a frontrunner being asked repeatedly under what circumstances would he drop out of the race.
"If you face the prospect of losing primaries, and you're not winning anymore, would you decide to step away at that point?" CNBC's John Harwood asked Trump recently.
Trump pointed out that he is leading in the polls, but added, "I'm not a masochist. … If that changed, if I was like some of these people at one percent and two percent, there's no reason to continue forward."
A few days later, NBC's Chuck Todd picked up Harwood's line of questioning. What did Trump mean by "I'm not a masochist"? Will he drop out? Trump gave essentially the same answer he gave Harwood.
Still later, The New York Times noted that Trump "offered a vainglorious pre-obituary of sorts for his candidacy."
How many frontrunners are pressed to offer a pre-obituary, vainglorious or not, for their candidacies? When Barack Obama pulled ahead in the Democratic race in 2008, did reporters ask when he would drop out? When Mitt Romney took the lead in 2012, did they ask when he planned to quit?
Trump has expressed irritation with the questions. On Twitter Sunday, he wrote, "I'm leading by big margins in every poll but the press keeps asking, would you ever get out? They are just troublemakers, I'm going to win!"
It's odd; Trump is right about that. But the reporters aren't just troublemakers. The questions come because they don't understand what is happening. Many observers predicted Trump would be long gone by now. They can't comprehend why he is still around. The when-will-you-quit questions are an attempt to create a reality that makes sense.
Just Google Trump's name and the phrase "law of gravity."
"You seem to think the laws of gravity are applying this year," the Times' David Brooks said to another panelist on "Meet the Press" a few weeks ago, "but so far they haven't."
"Trump defies the laws of gravity," echoed CNN's Jonathan Mann.
"Some candidates [are] rising, some falling and one candidate still seems to be defying gravity," noted NPR's Melissa Block.
There are lots of other examples. The reason the commentators cite the law of gravity is that they all embrace certain ideas about how campaigns work. Trump's campaign is not conforming to those ideas, and it is simply blowing their minds. (Mine, too, on more than one occasion.)
The same is true for the Sanders campaign. Over the weekend, the Democratic candidate held a rally in Boston that attracted 24,000 people. That was more than double the number drawn by candidate Barack Obama in 2007, when the political world was dazzled by Obama's ability to draw huge crowds.
When pictures of Sanders' Boston rally began to circulate on Twitter Sunday, showing Sanders above a vast sea of people, political types took notice. "Wowzers," said MSNBC's Chris Hayes, in a typical reaction.
Sanders has been steadily rising in the national polls since April. He has raised an enormous amount of money, virtually all of it in small donations. He inspires an Obama-like level of intensity in his followers. And there are those crowds.
And yet, Google some version of the phrase "Bernie Sanders is not going to be the Democratic nominee," and many examples will appear from many well-informed voices on left and right. It just does not compute for them that a 74 year-old socialist from a tiny, nearly all-white state could capture the Democratic presidential nomination. Maybe they're right, but so far Sanders is straining their ability to interpret events.
Recently Stuart Stevens, who was Mitt Romney's top aide in 2012, said of the course of the Republican race so far, "For Donald Trump to win, everything we know about politics has to be wrong."
It would be hard to express the bafflement of the political class more succinctly than that. Stevens and others remain confident that the political world will ultimately right itself. But it's been a very tough time for the law of gravity.
Read more at the Washington Examiner
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