Those of us who have stuck our necks out for Donald Trump, only to have them severely nicked on too many occasions (though not yet fully cut off), are holding our collective breaths, because the presumptive Republican nominee may finally have turned the corner.
For the last few days, basically since his grown children allegedly ganged up on him on Father’s Day and urged him to dump Corey Lewandowski, Donald Trump has been running a heckuva campaign.
It hasn’t just been the excellently written and delivered speech Trump made Wednesday morning skewering Hillary Clinton’s endless morass of lies, corruption, incompetence and greed, leavened by entitlement. (“Her campaign slogan is ‘I’m with her.’ You know what my response to that is? I’m with you, the American people.” “When she was at the State Department, everything went to Hell except her bank account.” Touché times two!)
It’s also the nonstop bombardment of messaging emerging from the Trump campaign that is suddenly uniformly consistent and timely. In the last day or so, since a link to a transcript of the speech arrived in my inbox at 7:57AM PDT, a half dozen or more of these emails have arrived, including a well-wrought tour of responses to the speech, admittedly biased toward Donald.
Unfortunately, however, we have been here before. We have been at turning points like this, only to have Trump wander off the reservation again, lost in a swamp of personal grievance and accusation, often over the most trivial circumstances, especially compared to the monumental issues of this electoral season—radical Islamic terrorism (we can include Iran in this) raging across the globe and an economy moribund for years at home. Trump has a polling lead on both those subjects and should stick to them with every drop of glue in the jar and then get a refill.
Will he do it? Will he suddenly get at least a little bit zen and engage in one (or rather two) pointedness?
I’m betting yes and the reason is family. I know it sounds absurd that a man who has been married thrice to celebrity wives and been chasing beautiful women, I would guess, from age seven to be an exemplar of family values, but, as they say, the Lord works in mysterious ways. Or maybe the Almighty just threw up when He read the details of the Clinton marriage in retired Secret Service officer Gary Byrne’s book Crisis of Character due out Monday. (God gets to read advance proofs.)
Actually, it’s likely that Trump was a terrific father, given the way his adult children—Eric, Ivanka, Donald Jr. and Tiffany—have turned out. (I’m guessing young Barron will be fine too.). Kudos to Donald–being a parent is the most important job we have in life and therefore one of the most important recommendations you could have for the presidency. (I’m serious.) And now Donald is being repaid by his kids, who are the ones to give him the straight truth after a month of rough sledding. He’s obviously been listening and he shouldn’t stop.
His son-in-law Jared Kushner—Ivanka’s husband—has also clearly been one of the important assets to the campaign. They say he’s had his hand in several of Trump’s recent and best speeches. Kudos to him as well.
Wouldn’t it be amazing if the Trumps turned out to be some surprising modern Manhattan version of the von Trapp Family (Trump-Trapp… who knows?), this one bent on freeing us not from the Nazis but from those contemporary Nazis of radical Islam? Cue Melania singing “The Hills Are Alive.” The Lord does work in mysterious ways.
A little stretched? Maybe. Whatever the case, the big losers today are the “NeverTrump” crowd. I’m not naming names because I have enough enemies and I admire many of those people. But for the moment, at least, they should hold their fire. If the Trump we now see before us can stay the course, they will have to amend their thinking, and quickly.
Roger L. Simon is a prize-winning novelist, Academy Award-nominated screenwriter and co-founder of PJ Media. His next book—I Know Best: How Moral Narcissism Is Destroying Our Republic, If It Hasn’t Already—just published by Encounter Books June 14, 2016. You can read an excerpt here. You can see a brief interview about the book with the Wall Street Journal’s Opinion Journal here. You can hear an interview about the book with Mark Levin here. You can order the book here.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member