So Donald…Let’s Say You Get The Nomination. What Will You Do If You Lose The General?

keep-calm-and-blame-someone-else-37Donald Trump has spent his career inflating his successes and ignoring his failures, and that has worked rather well for him and his bankruptcy attorneys. Whether he really is the incredibly successful business man he claims is up to the forensic accountants, and I don’t much care either way.  But Donald Trump claims that everything he has done has worked. Everything was a success…until other people got involved and screwed things up.

But if he gets the Republican nomination for president this summer, there will be nowhere to hide. Nothing he can say will mask his performance as the Republican candidate for president. There is nothing that he can say or claim that will be sufficiently obfuscating that a failure in the general election won’t go on his permanent record.

Yes, he can blame the Republican establishment for insufficient support…but wait a second, I thought he was fabulously wealthy? Money will fix almost everything that the Republican National Committee might refuse to do. Building a ground game for Getting Out The Vote (GOTV) is what candidates do in the primaries, without assistance from the national committee, so it is certainly possible. And Trump has crowed for months that he doesn’t need the establishment anyway, so that excuse will ring hollow.

And shall we be polite and not use the correct but vulgar terminology for the skills of the professionals at the RNC? The folks who gave us McCain’s brilliant campaign, and Romney’s even more impressive one? Donald Trump has no need for their so-called expertise. Any decent advertising agency and some conservative bloggers can provide better material and strategy for his general election campaign.

And even if there are rational excuses for his almost inevitable loss against Hillary; Americans do not like losers. Oh, they’ll tolerate a primary loss…just look at Ronald Reagan. But losing a general election is a damning indictment of everything that the candidate stands for. There is little chance for recovery after that. Yes, they slink back to their senate seats and continue to play politics, but does anyone really take them seriously?

Romney, McCain, Kerry, Gore, Dole, Dukakis, Mondale…pretty damned impressive bunch. That’s just where I would go for advice.

Add Trump to that list, and his entire raison d’être — the self-aggrandizement of Donald Trump — will collapse into a YUUGE steaming heap of cancelled TV shows and mocking headlines and worst of all, his realization that the curtain has been pulled back and he can be seen for what he really is.

The question is: If Donald Trump sees a reasonable chance of losing the election, will he bow out? There are innumerable ways of leaving on top without losing face and prestige. Or will his immense ego not allow him to consider the possibility that he can, and probably will lose the election?

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