As Donald Trump continues to overwhelm media coverage of the Republican presidential primary and threatens to defy traditional political logic by remaining atop the polls, rival GOP campaigns are beginning to diverge on how to handle him.
Some campaign teams are downright flabbergasted by his endurance. Others are privately unsure on what it will take for him to ultimately implode. But what’s abundantly clear is that all are burning time wrestling with how exactly to deal with The Donald on a day-to-day basis.
Scott Walker, for his part, is determined to keep calm.
After a steady if not splashy debate performance last week, the second-term Wisconsin governor said he had no interest in going after his fellow Republican rivals, even as the 2016 campaign moves into a more intense phase.
“To me, the real focus needs to be on the fall of 2016,” he told reporters at a Friday campaign stop in Cleveland. “We’re going to talk about how we match up best against Hillary Clinton going forward.”
Asked by U.S. News whether he would refrain from negative comments about all of his primary opponents, Walker said, “It’s legitimate to have contrasts. I’m just not looking to pick fights out there and I’m certainly not going to get personal.”
That may be easier said than done, though: Asked by Fox News anchor Bill Hemmer on Monday whether Trump’s presence threatens to consume the entire campaign, Walker responded with a jab, comparing the real estate mogul’s political endeavor to a pile-up.
“For a lot of us, it’s like watching a car accident instead of focusing on the direction we should be headed,” he replied. “I think he’s drowning just about everybody else out there.”
On “Meet the Press” on Sunday, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio also tried to take a higher road, declining to assess the fallout from Trump’s comments about Fox anchor Megyn Kelly, in which he said Kelly during the debate had “blood coming out of her eyes, out of her wherever.”
“We’ll let him answer for what he says,” Rubio replied, noting that Trump “has the poll numbers that justify him being on the stage.”
But while Walker and Rubio have largely tried to rise above the circus around them — attempting to move past questions about Trump by reverting to their own narratives — Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul is taking the opposite approach, deciding to aim squarely at The Donald.
In an opinion piece published in The Journal by IJReview on Monday, Paul calls Trump a “fake conservative,” pointing to his contrary positions on a litmus of issues and candidates.
Trump is a former Democrat who used to support late-term abortion and universal health care. Yet even as these past stands have come to light, his supporters have only dug in, concluding that his blunt talk and business acumen supercede past political preferences.
Paul says the only way to stop Trump from trying to “hoodwink” the tea party is to call him out.
“Frankly, it sounds too much like he is someone used to bullying to get his way. What do you do to a bully? You stand up to him. That’s what I did on the debate stage, and I was the only one,” Paul wrote.
But it’s not clear that Paul’s debate attack moved the needle for him.
A fresh Public Policy Polling survey of 619 “usual” GOP Iowa caucus voters over the weekend found Trump still resilient in the wake of another media storm.
His 19 percent led the caucus field, with Ben Carson and Walker tied for second with 12 percent apiece. Walker had held a regular polling lead in Iowa since February. That’s now gone.
Meanwhile, both Rubio and Paul were toward the back of the pack in single digits, with Paul’s fall in the Hawkeye State being particularly alarming. Once polling near the top the field, Paul’s now viewed negatively by 45 percent of caucusgoers, the worst of any GOP candidate.
Monday on Fox, Walker maintained that handling the Trump mayhem would be a good trial run for long-term message discipline.
“This will be a good test for us going into the general election. We’re not going to get distracted. We’re going to talk about what we’re for, not who we’re against or what we’re against,” he said.
But now suddenly, even he is playing from behind in Iowa, the key springboard to his path to the nomination.
In the short term, another Trump tirade has proven political prognosticators wrong again.
“Donald Trump’s public fight with Fox News might hurt him in the long run,” said Dean Debnam, president of PPP. “But for the time being he continues to lead the pack.”
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Donald Trump Testing Fellow Republican Candidates’ Messaging originally appeared on usnews.com
