I am listening to Annie Duke on the Smerconish show, talking about Trump.  You may wonder why her opinions matter.  Annie Duke (a childhood friend of mine, but that’s not relevant) is known as “the Duchess of Poker”, being one of the highest ranking female poker players ever.  And she was on Celebrity Apprentice for that, although that’s not why she’s talking about Trump.  Annie, now retired from poker, is also an expert on decision-making (and sure, the two are related).  She’s also eloquent and smart as a whip.

Annie is pointing out that this is an emotional election and she credits Trump’s success to confirmation bias.  Trump is saying what his supporters believe to be true, and that’s why he has the supporters that he has.  Smerconish asked what is to me the $64,000 question of the Trump campaign — and I am paraphrasing: “Is Trump saying things that he believes to be true, or is saying things that he knows his supporters believe to be true?”  Annie went with the first one (for the most part) — Trump believes what he says.

I think that’s right.  I think Trump gets his information from sources that aren’t interested in the truth, but in what people want to believe.  And he simply repeats it, and in doing so, he augments its “veracity”.

I think that explains his appeal. The problem is that his appeal is limited.  It will get him a plurality of Republicans (especially in a large field of candidates), but we’re seeing that it really cannot get him a majority within his own party.  He is, as Nate Silver says, shaping up to be the weakest non-incumbent Republican presidential candidate in the modern era:

As you can see, at this point in the process, all the non-incumbent GOPs who went on to win (Reagan in 1980, Bush 41 in 1988, Bush 43 in 2000) had acquired 50% or more of the vote within the GOP during the primaries.  Trump has yet to see 40%.

This bears out the limitation of Trump’s outsider approach to politics.  Speaking with a populist message to people who aren’t interested in facts, and getting free press with his firebrand antics, are apparently not enough.  He actually needs to use old fashioned campaign strategy.

Let me put it another way: if Cruz wins the nomination, it will be because he saw the delegate rules of the convention, he got a team together, they looked at the delegation-selection rules of each state, and they worked within the rules to make sure it worked to his advantage.

At some point — it’s already starting actually — Trump will start crying foul about “the rules” and claim that delegates are being “stolen” from him, but the undeniable fact is this:

Trump is, and has been, operating under the same rules as Cruz.  They are rules that were in existence before BOTH of them got into the race.

That Trump has not bothered to find out those delegate rules, or to work them to his advantage, says a lot about not only Trump as a candidate, but Trump as a president.

One thing is for sure — when it comes to “the art of the delegate deal”, Cruz is taking Trump to school.

This is Trump’s flaw.  For all his apparent genuineness and populist defeatism, you just can’t show up and rely on whatever shit comes out of your mouth to get you into the White House.  He have to plan and prepare and know how things work:

“The nuts and bolts of presidential politics is an archaic language and very few people understand it. Outsiders need insiders to be successful,” said Republican political strategist Ford O’Connell. “If you want to crack the Da Vinci code, you need insiders.”

Trump is doing just that. Last week, he hired Paul Manafort, a master of insider politics, to run his convention strategy.

A little late, don’t you think.  Over the weekend, Trump was even losing candidates from states that he already won.

And his lately elected team dropped the ball:

Trump’s last-minute organizing effort did not go well. The leaflet his campaign handed out listed a slate of 26 delegates. But in many cases the numbers indicating their ballot position — more than 600 delegates are running for 13 slots — were off, meaning that Trump’s team was mistakenly directing votes toward other candidates’ delegates.

When the balloting results were announced Saturday evening, Cruz picked up the 13 statewide at-large delegates chosen during Saturday’s convention, with the final three appointed automatically by the Colorado Republican Party, giving him all 34 of Colorado’s elected delegates (Trump did win six of the 34 alternate spots).

It is kind of like the revelation this morning that his wife and kids won’t be voting for Trump in the NY primary… because they are not registered.  Probably should have thought of that before.

So we see this erosion slowly eating in the Trump campaign.  And we start to learn more about him, too.  I think people are starting to see he is not the man of the people he claims to be:

Since the first day of his presidential campaign, Donald Trump has said that he gave more than $102 million to charity in the past five years.

To back up that claim, Trump’s campaign compiled a list of his contributions— 4,844 of them, filling 93 pages.

But, in that massive list, one thing was missing.

Not a single one of those donations was actually a personal gift of Trump’s own money.

Instead, according to a Washington Post analysis, many of the gifts that Trump cited to prove his generosity were free rounds of golf, given away by his courses for charity auctions and raffles.

The largest items on the list were not cash gifts but land-
conservation agreements to forgo development rights on property Trump owns.

Trump’s campaign also counted a parcel of land that he’d given to New York state — although that was in 2006, not within the past five years.

In addition, many of the gifts on the list came from the charity that bears his name, the Donald J. Trump Foundation, which didn’t receive a personal check from Trump from 2009 through 2014, according to the most recent public tax filings. Its work is largely funded by others, although Trump decides where the gifts go.

Some beneficiaries on the list are not charities at all: They included clients, other businesses and tennis superstar Serena Williams.

This list produced by Trump’s campaign — which has not been reported in detail before — provides an unusually broad portrait of Trump’s giving, and his approach to philanthropy in general.

This page, from Trump’s 93-page list of charitable contributions shows free rounds of golf. In all, Trump claimed credit for 2,900 free rounds given away at his club.

It reveals how Trump has demonstrated less of the soaring, world-changing ambitions in his philanthropy than many other billionaires. Instead, his giving appears narrowly tied to his business and, now, his political interests.

His foundation, for example, frequently gave money to groups that paid to use Trump’s facilities, and it donated to conservatives who could help promote Trump’s rise in the Republican Party. The foundation’s second-biggest donation described on the campaign’s list went to the charity of a man who had settled a lawsuit with one of Trump’s golf courses after being denied a hole-in-one prize.

So Trump has a yuuuge problem now on many levels.

This is getting good.