The presidential campaign of Donald Trump appears to be coming unraveled. He has restructured his campaign team twice in less than a month in response to falling poll ratings. A close aide has been revealed as a convicted felon with dubious links to pro-Russian Ukrainian politicians.
Trump himself is now in the spotlight over past business dealing with Russian oligarchs investing in New York properties. Trump is insisting that he was only licensing his name and had no real involvement with these men who are well connected with Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin. Such a protest is unconvincing from a micro-manager who worries over the smallest details.
The significance of the troubles that are beginning to mire the Trump campaign lies not in their details but in the large and generally still unexplored backstory to the man who wants to become the most powerful person on the planet. Trump made much of his role as an outsider. He has pointed gleefully to Hillary Clinton’s dented and stained political past.
As the classic establishment member, Clinton’s record as a machine politician contained all the outright lies, half truths and evasions that come from toeing the party line, regardless of any private convictions, assuming that someone as chameleon-like as either of the Clintons, actually has any personal principles.
For Trump in his early campaigning days, she was a sitting duck. The same ammunition he used on her saw off his establishment rivals in the Republican nomination race. But even though her political record is frankly unedifying, at least that record is there for everyone to see. It may well give rise to suspicions that there are other skeletons in her cupboard but essentially most of what US voters need to know about her is on the record.
Not so with Trump. And in launching such personal and inflammatory attacks on his Democratic rival, Trump has opened himself up to no less vicious counter-fire.
And his backstory is only part of the ammunition that the Clinton campaign has to hand. Trump himself is busy producing a plentiful supply, courtesy of his seemingly unstoppable motormouth. His latest campaign team is trying to get him to cease his unscripted off-the-cuff remarks. That will have been one of the conditions for them to agree to come on board. But their task is likely to prove impossible. Trump does not simply love the sound of his own voice, he loves to shock and provoke. He doubtless reckons that his belligerent and insulting style has got him to the nomination, now it can carry him all the way to the White House.
But it is probably not going to work out that way. In the end, voters will ask if Trump can be trusted. He has promised to apply the principles of business that he claims to understand so well, to fix the US economy. But it is emerging that his business record is deeply checkered with a string of dubious deals. So can he be trusted with US foreign policy, can he be trusted not to launch nuclear devastation as a result of some crazy act of international brinkmanship? Will voters want a high-risk outsider or stick with yet more of the same establishment politics epitomized in the unappetizing but predictable Hillary Clinton?
