Trump’s Ceiling Is His Wallet
Running for president is about to become a lot more expensive, and his business interests are vulnerable.
By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.
Republican presidential hopeful Donald Trump campaigning in Richmond, Va., Oct. 14. Photo: Steve Helber/Associated Press
None of his offenses against propriety seem to have dinged the support that, in a crowded race, keeps Donald Trump atop the GOP primary polls.
Republicans are now talking about a brokered convention, which could be a disaster for the country, and for the GOP, and quite possibly hand the election to Hillary Clinton without a real contest or even critique of her agenda.
So goes the fear. But unless we miss our guess, our long national nightmare-cum-sketch comedy show actually has a termination date. It will end the moment campaigning begins to threaten Mr. Trump’s finances and business interests.
Mr. Trump has gotten extraordinarily far based on free media plus a degree of self-funding that might come from petty cash. But he hasn’t shown even the willingness to spend the $44 million that Mitt Romney spent on his failed 2008 effort. Running for president is expensive—a billion-dollars-plus expensive, even with a party behind you, and it’s not clear that even with the nomination Mr. Trump would have the GOP behind him in any meaningful sense, its foot soldiers, its donors, its super PACs.
Mr. Trump claimed when he launched his campaign in June, “I’m not using donors. I don’t care. I’m really rich.” But not only has he not dipped into capital, lending his campaign a mere $1.8 million through the third quarter. His capital is not as deep ($10 billion) as he lets on.
Forbes and Bloomberg News put his wealth at $2 billion to $4 billion. And assets that he could reasonably convert to cash are even less. Bloomberg puts the figure as low as $70 million, less than what several candidates in the race (Bush, Clinton, Cruz) and their super PACs already have raised.
And running is about to become a lot more expensive. When the campaign goes national after Iowa and New Hampshire, Mr. Trump would have to spend money on TV ads. To participate in widespread primaries and a convention fight he would have to hire staff. Mr. Trump, from day one, has likely never been down with any of that.
He won’t want to liquidate major holdings. He won’t want to sign his name to nine-figure mortgages. There’s a reason other candidates have been fundraising for years. Mr. Trump’s $3.7 million in “unsolicited donations” (average: $50) in the third quarter were nice, but these aren’t the makings of a major fundraising network even in the unlikely event that Mr. Trump could find an army of like-minded affluent Americans who want to support his campaign.
The second way he’s vulnerable is damage to his business interests. Mr. Trump has had an easy punching bag in the U.S. immigration system, which, at last count, was sufficiently incompetent that 12 million people reside in the U.S. illegally. To say Muslim immigration should be suspended until we’re sure we can tell who is a terrorist might seem reasonable on first glance.
But the idea becomes insupportable when you remember there are one billion Muslims in the world, and that many important U.S. business leaders and entrepreneurs and professionals are immigrants and can hardly be barred from departing and returning on a routine basis.
In any case, his comments have become an opening. Already Mr. Trump’s Middle Eastern business interests are under assault. He lost a few U.S. deals early on due to his slurs on Mexican-Americans. Now a handful of Silicon Valley biggies—the CEOs of Apple, Facebook and Google—have ventured criticism without mustering quite the courage to mention him by name.
What happens when important business partners start letting Mr. Trump know, publicly and noisily, they think he’s doing serious damage to the country? By Mr. Trump’s own inflated reckoning, most of his net worth resides in the value of his name.
Our guess is that Mr. Trump has always planned on being satisfied with making a splash and ventilating his high opinion of himself. He will rightly be able to claim that he gave neglected voters a voice and transformed the debate. Notice that he manages to maintain his jolly equanimity even when being vilified. He is not grimly “on a mission” as so many candidates are whose self-image is wrapped up in electoral success.
We could be wrong but the Trump effort is probably self-liquidating. Expect a glorious, “I’ve got better things to do than hang around with you losers” exit just about the time he would have to start spending real money to keep going.
0 comments:
Publicar un comentario