Over the last year, top news stories have been filled with Donald Trump. Hardly a day has gone by when we haven’t seen something ridiculous come out of his mouth — whether he’s attacking a Gold Star family, making fun of Heidi Cruz, talking about his genitals during a debate or saying a judge from Indiana can’t do his job because he’s Mexican, there is always something new going on with the Donald.
So this week has been notable. Because other than the fall of Paul Manafort and the rise of Kellyanne Conway and Steve Bannon, there hasn’t been much Trump news. Yes, he’s $650 million in debt. Yes, he said black people have “nothing to lose” by voting for him, which is either comically uninspiring or willfully ignorant, possibly both. He’s been accused of hiking Trump Tower prices when his campaign donors are paying the bill. But compared to previous Trump firestorms, these wounds are not self-inflicted — and so they are more minor.
In fact, Trump has often tried to act like a person instead of a cartoon this week. He apologized vaguely for saying “the wrong thing.” He spent some time in flood-stricken Louisiana. Admittedly, those events were less than shining examples of contrition and kindness — his expression of remorse was unspecific at best and he appeared to be handing out Play-Doh and doing not much else in Louisiana — but I give him an extremely small amount of credit for trying.
Accordingly, his poll numbers have risen. He’s still running significantly behind, but there’s been a definite, if slight, rise over the last week following his meteoric plunge after the DNC.
That’s not surprising. The best thing for the Trump campaign right now is to stay on the safe, shallow fringes of the news, where they’re getting an unremarkable level of press coverage. No perpetual intrigue machine, sure, but also no negative press. They’ve been taking a beating in the polls and the media due to their candidate’s inability to keep his mouth shut — a week of just flying under the radar is time for the bruises to heal.
And it’s working. Whether he can keep it up until November is, of course, a toss-up — personally, I barely have faith that he’ll keep it together long enough for me to publish this column — but for now, Trump’s having a pretty good week. And polls are reflecting that, if only lukewarmly.
So, why are polls reflecting that?
Admittedly, Trump is not bouncing back from this as easily as he has from the other storms he’s weathered, but any climb at all is disappointing. Have people really already forgotten how shocked we were about his attacks on the Khans? The petty squabbles with party leadership? How fickle are voters if a week that is slightly less bad than all the other weeks sways us? There were voters who let go of their support for Trump over his disaster of a few weeks, where there seemed to be a new horrible story out about him every day, who have now reversed that decision based on his stunning ability to act like an adult for a whole week.
At this point, I have to point out the double standard I addressed in a previous column again: We are not taking Trump seriously, like we are with Clinton. 15,000 “new” emails, which were part of the FBI’s investigation into a matter she has been cleared of criminal wrongdoing on, are currently a big deal for her campaign, despite the fact that they don’t actually mean anything new for the case. It’s certainly not irrelevant to her candidacy, but it’s incredible that Trump can be racist, sexist and reactionary as often as he wants and we all brush over it with that same “oh, Donald” attitude when she’s still regularly answering to two scandals that took place years ago.
All in all, she has run a much cleaner, more competent campaign than her opponent. But our attention span for his problems is about five days, if they’re bad, and our attention span for hers is decades. If she’d picked a knock-down drag-out fight with Patricia Smith — who lost her son in Benghazi and had some not-very-nice-things to say about Clinton at the RNC — we would not have gotten over that in under a week.
It’s just one more way we’re treating one candidate like a real politician — like an adult — while we continue to pretend Donald Trump is some kind of toddler whose messes we should be lenient with. He might act like one, but he’s a serious contender for the presidency. And yet we reward him in the polls when he goes seven whole days without something ridiculous coming out of his mouth.
Don’t allow the things Trump says to become normal. Not caring would be all well and good if he weren't a threat, but since he is, it’s truly dangerous to wave away the horrible things he has said throughout the course of this campaign.
Don’t forget the bigoted things he's forced us all to listen to as if they were legitimate conservative rhetoric. Don’t forget the petty fights he’s picked with everyone from debate moderators to Marco Rubio to the Khans. Don’t forget the inconsistency of his positions. Don’t forget his incompetency on foreign policy. Don’t reward him for things that we expect on a regular basis from everyone else.
Don’t make him special. Give him the reception his behavior throughout the campaign has deserved, instead of pretending that him holding it together for one week is praiseworthy.
It’s barely, minimally competent. And that’s all we should treat it as.