Trump is a master marketer. In the 2016 race, he came up with a clear and compelling rationale for assuming the highest office in the land. He was, he said, going to: Make America Great Again. That’s why it’s all the more shocking that Trump has appeared so nonplussed when asked to articulate his raison d’être. During a summer town hall session, when Sean Hannity asked the president to lay out his goals for his second term, he couldn’t offer up even a hint of a rationale. Last week, during an interview with the New York Times’ Peter Baker, Trump fumbled the ball once more, unable to describe the nuts and bolts of his agenda and, in Baker’s view, providing a meandering answer: “But so I think, I think it would be, I think it would be very, very, I think we’d have a very, very solid, we would continue what we’re doing, we’d solidify what we’ve done, and we have other things on our plate that we want to get done.”
That’s Lesson One in Presidential Politics: Know what you’re hoping to accomplish and why you’re in the game—at the gut level.
