HOW DONALD TRUMP FIGURED OUT THE VALUE OF #SORRYNOTSORRY:
It seems to me that this is a wonderful game for the media to play, but the candidate is always the loser. And the reason is that when you apologize, no matter how sincere it may or may not be, the public only hears the admission that you were wrong. And despite your remorse over your error, you are now the person who was wrong. Given the unrealistic expectations we place on candidates in general, that’s not the best tag to have sewn on your jacket.
Contrast that with Trump. He’s been declared to have broken the rules now more times than I can count without the help of a Cray supercomputer. One of the more famous examples was when he seemingly implied that Megyn Kelly was on her time of the month during the first debate. You can argue for the next fourteen months whether or not that’s what he really meant, but the media latched onto it like a bull terrier. And yet when the reporters came to ask if he wanted to apologize, Trump basically told them, screw that. She should apologize to me!
For better or worse, Trump maintains a rock steady course of projected self-confidence, insisting that he’s right and anyone who disagrees with him must therefore be wrong. And the fact is, people respond to that. They don’t want some “loser” marching up to the microphone with a hangdog look on their face saying I’m sorry. They want a winner who tells them that things are going to get better. And that’s what Trump delivers.
It’s an idea that’s reminiscent of some other famous non-apologists. I’m reminded of one of Andrew Breitbart’s final tweets before he died, in which he simply asked, “Apologize for what?”
Perhaps by being fixture in the white-hot media world of Manhattan since the 1980s, Trump knows how the game is played in the MSM, and seems to have mastered it. Of course, Leon Wolf’s theory that “Donald Trump is the political equivalent of chaff, a billion shiny objects all floating through the sky at once, ephemeral, practically without substance, serving almost exclusively to distract from more important things – yet nonetheless completely impossible to ignore,” is also true as well. Yes Trump says a lot of crazy stuff (such as his slur against Kelly), but kudos to him for not apologizing and simply plowing on, rather than play by the MSM rules that have hamstrung other Republican candidates.
UPDATE: Trump as Political Pick-Up Artist: The Donald is “Negging” His Rivals Brilliantly: “The billionaire’s insult-laced patter is straight outta a scurrilous dating scene,” Nick Gillespie writes at Reason.