Trump Gets grudging respect From Leftist New Republic Magazine

The New Republic hates to admit this about Donald Trump:

Then came Donald Trump, a man self-taught in all the elements of the modern political campaign: how to read what the customer wants, and command the camera, and look like a winner.

He is not, perhaps, on closer examination, quite as unscripted or unschooled as he would like to make us think. Pat Buchanan, in his 1992 “pitchfork” insurgency against George H.W. Bush, proposed a “Buchanan fence” that was to run along 200 miles of Mexican border. In 2002, a bunch of former Buchanan acolytes formed the “America First” party, reviving that old slogan long before the Donald. Ross Perot, in his 1992 third-party campaign, refused to pony up what he considered the outrageous dollars for TV ads, saying he could always get another free hour on Larry King, and it was he who formulated the very Trumpian message: “We used to have the world’s greatest economic engine. We let it slip away, and with it went millions of jobs and taxpayers.”

Yet whatever it lacked in originality, Trump’s campaign was able to sweep away, for a time at least, all of the campaign janissaries, the onetime helpmates who ultimately took over the political system for their own enrichment and lionization, and left us stumbling about, unable to distinguish what is real from what is not. What Trump was able to understand without having to rely on a single pollster or handler was what a nerve he struck: how many people agreed with his nonsolutions and his barroom blather, his hateful reductions of the world and all the people in it. With his almost uncanny instincts, he grasped how many people in this country will respond to simple ideas, forcefully said.

It's amazing how if you listen to Rush Limbaugh's radio show : it's much cheaper than hiring expensive pollsters.