The Rise of Compassionate Populism

George W. Bush gave us compassionate conservatism; Trump is now trying to give us compassionate populism, as we heard at his North Carolina rally last night. This isn’t crazy. We hear a lot about “working class whites,” but there are plenty of working-class Latinos and African-Americans and populism needn’t be repellent to them, unless you go out of your way to insult them and trample on all sorts of political land-mines the way Trump has over the last year. It is going to be very difficult to erase the memory of all that, although the re-tooled Trump team seems to want to make the effort.

I have been a skeptic of the Trump “pivots” over the last few months. I’m open to this time being different, though. There has been lots of talk of how the campaign shake-up favors the forces that want “Trump to be Trump,” and how this will mean all the same chaos and senseless controversies. But it is possible to have the same Trump message — focused almost exclusively on trade and immigration and fiercely anti-establishment — and present it less stupidly and self-destructively. This is what the North Carolina speech was.

It is true that 70-year old men don’t change. Trump nonetheless has at times shown an ability to stop hurting himself. When he said he had decided to stop talking about Judge Curiel, some people said there was no way he could that, but he did. Trump doesn’t need to change who he is now, so much as do a better job of trying to hide who he is — by sticking to prepared remarks at rallies, posting only staff-approved tweets, and avoiding making news in interviews, except deliberately. If these things require some discipline and deftness, they aren’t impossible and Trump might at least improve at them, if he genuinely has the interest in trying.

Of course, this is creating a very low bar for a candidate who is already trailing badly. And all that said, if he’s not careful, he’s going to immediately give away any benefit from his expression of regret last night:

Trump to @TomLlamasABC on whether his speech was an apology last night: pic.twitter.com/Ys4JNPSXSB

— Sopan Deb (@SopanDeb) August 19, 2016