As I’ve mentioned at various points in recent months, when stupid things happen in politics many people are tempted to believe that looks are somehow deceiving and that what looks stupid, ill-prepared or desperate is actually canny, intended or ingenious. We should all resist this temptation.
When things look stupid or ridiculous, they generally are.
Obviously, I’m talking here about the latest developments from the Trump campaign. But this goes beyond the specific application of Trump’s Razor.
Consider a few points.
In response to Saturday night’s New York Times revelation, the Trump campaign sent its top surrogates out wholly unprepared. Whether Trump qualifies as a ‘genius’ for managing a cataclysmic business failure and then using the failure to avoid taxes for years into the future is a subjective judgment, though not a terribly difficult one to make. But Rudy Giuliani also went on the Sunday shows arguing that Trump had a fiduciary responsibility to act as he did – indeed, that he could be sued if he’d acted otherwise. It is true that corporate officers have a fiduciary duty, though not an absolute one, to maximize investor or shareholder profits. But these are personal tax returns. It’s the most elementary fact of corporate and tax law that no one has a fiduciary responsibility to themselves.
This may not seem like the biggest of Giuliani’s goofs considering he called Trump a “genius” and said he’d be better than “a woman.” But this error is more revealing. The Trump campaign knew about the Times story in advance. They sent Giuliani out either with no surrogate preparation or preparation by people who didn’t have the slightest idea what they were talking about. The same applies to threats to sue The New York Times. Trump has no case whatsoever against the Times, as I explained yesterday. This is a campaign that is desperate and stunned and unable to react to events.
The same applies to Trump’s new argument that reforming the tax code is one of his top priorities and that his decades-long manipulation of the same means he’s the best to fix it. People come up with plenty of audacious arguments. That doesn’t mean they make any sense. There is a great deal of public polling suggesting that people see paying taxes as a civic obligation and are generally offended by people who seek to game the system even if they are entitled to do so by the letter of the law. Today’s CNN poll reports that 86% of registered voters believe paying their “fair share” of taxes is a “civic duty” while only 12% believe “unnecessary burden and Americans should do everything they can to pay as little as possible.” Those numbers make Trump’s argument almost impossible to sustain.
When your boat sinks and you’re in the water with no life jacket almost every strategy looks ridiculous. This is a basic reality. But like well trained pilots, competent campaigns manage to execute on the basics and get them right even under the most trying circumstances.
