You know your presidential campaign’s in trouble when your top aide is arguing that you’re not really a sociopath, you’re just pretending to be a sociopath. That’s what happened in a leaked audio recording of a closed-door meeting between Trump’s people and the RNC.
All along, Trump has been whining about how unfairly he’s been treated by the Republicans. Now all of a sudden, Trump’s cadre wants to kiss and make up. Now they’re all like, “JK, you guys. We’re nice people and we want to work together with you as long as you give us the nomination, ‘kay?”
Paul Manafort, Trump’s new top guy after his previous top guy got arrested for battery, told RNC officials:
“He gets it. The part that he’s been playing is now evolving into the part that you’ve been expecting. The negatives will come down, the image is going to change.”
I feel like that’s a bit insulting to the GOP voter base that Manafort is basically saying, Yes, Trump’s an a-hole. But he’s a strategic a-hole, and is only doing is a-hole routine to appeal to your people. Once he has to appeal to the general population, he’ll quit being such a rube and will be normal. But maybe the RNC won’t feel that way about it. Self-awareness has never been a Republican strongsuit.
Although he insists he’s “having fun” with his party imploding, Reince Priebus must be sh*tting bricks now that his options for nominee are down to a sociopath or a… Wait a minute, they’re all sociopaths.
So I guess the question he needs to answer is: Does he go with the sociopath who says he’s pretending to be a sociopath in order to win votes? Or the unabashed sociopath who sleeps with prostitutes and has an unexplained cellar full of canned soups?
We’re not fooled: the only reason Trump’s team is doing this now is that they have finally realized that they have to make nice with the RNC in order to be nominated. If he were going to evolve, he would have evolved already. Unfortunately, he’s still the snake he’s always been.
Featured image is by Marc Nozell, available under a Creative Commons 2.0 license.
