Trump Dilemma

A Dilemma is when you are damned if you do, and damned if you don't.

Trump has a dilemma.     He has a brand, but what he needs to do damages his brand.  He says getting money from special interest donors is corrupting, but he needs to raise money from special interest donors.

What to do, how to do it, and how to explain it?

Trump is largely self-financed, through a loan to his campaign.   Trump's brand is to be uncorrupted by receiving money from special interest donors.   It is powerful for him.   (Powerful for Bernie Sanders, too).

Trump is using relatively small amounts of his own money because he got abundant free media.  (Bernie did not get the free media, but he got over a hundred million dollars in small contributions--more than Obama got in 2008.)   Not getting money from special interest PACS, especially those representing energy companies, drug companies, and Wall Street, allowed Trump to delegitimize his opponents by saying they are mere mouthpieces for the special interests.    They are phonies, he said.  Sell outs.

Trump is ready to turn his attention to Hillary and the time and subject matter are ripe.  Sanders already raised the issue against Hillary, so it won't even sound partisan.  Trump is ready to say Hillary is corrupted, she is compromised, she cannot do real reform, she is a lackey of Wall Street.

Wall Street Journal Story

Being financially independent is part of Trump's brand, but now, in the general election, he and his party need the money.    If he doesn't lead the effort to get the money from the GOP donor class--the "usual suspects"-- then the ground-game Get Out The Vote effort essential for the GOP will be weak.  Political parties do a "coordinated campaign" and the campaigns for the presidency are coordinated with those of other offices sharing voter files and volunteer bases of the individual campaigns.    In real life on-the-ground campaigning volunteers are getting out the vote for a whole team--president, congressman, state legislators, etc.

He may attempt to fitness this by looking for SuperPACs to do the work, giving his effort a veneer of hands-off, but the whole excuse for SuperPACs being able to raise and spend money without limits is that they can not coordinate with the campaigns.   Yet the whole point of a local, state, congressional, presidential coordinated Get Out The Vote campaigns is that it is in fact tightly coordinated with the campaigns.   In my Oregon experience they are actually named "the coordinated campaign".  They target voters and precincts combining efforts from all the campaigns.   

It will be hard for Trump or anyone to maintain a fiction that a coordinated campaign is not coordinated.  

Bloomberg News Story

Trump needs to decide what to do and how to describe it.   Trump is a master at explaining away problems, and may try to define away the problem with bluff and bravado, saying that the SuperPACS are for the rest of the now-unified GOP, that he himself isn't taking the money, etc.   He may assert it and stick to it.  He has practice at this (Mexico will pay for the wall, we will deport all eleven million people, etc.)   News stories about campaign finance details may not have real traction because voters already assume that campaign laws are nitpick-ish and unenforceable and are casually broken anyway.  Possibly Trump keeps his brand intact.

But it is hard to pretend something is not happening when it requires a billion dollars in checks and a million volunteers to make it happen.   This isn't a quiet handshake wink and nod between a couple of campaign managers.   This requires Trump to help raise serious money in very large chunks.   Trump will  have some explaining to do.

Trump has been unusually effective in explaining away problems precisely because his messages have been simple.   Hillary is the one with the complicated, lawyered-up hedged message of why certain things are questionable, but fully legal.  Alas for Hillary, that is her brand.   Not Trump.  Trump is the one with a message that might well be wrong--or brutal--or xenophobic--but it has had the advantage of being simple and clear; build a big wall; torture enemies;  deport all illegals;  ban all Muslims; punish all companies who move factories offshore.   So any effort by Trump to finesse this or bluff it out will likely damage his brand in yet another direction, making him look like the double talking politicians he condemns.

Trump needs to risk damage to his brand, or else he damages the party he is trying to unify behind him.   He needs to raise money from people he has condemned, he needs to do the very thing he defines as corrupting, and he needs to try to explain it away which will make him look sneaky.

It is a dilemma, and Trump needs to decide how he will handle it right now.