There is a little bit of Frank Sinatra in Donald Trump

Unless you are drinking from the cistern that Bill Kristol and his herd top off daily, you will have been impressed by Donald Trump’s long press conference yesterday at his golf course in Bedminster, New Jersey. Kristol’s latest puddles include the charge that Trump and Elon Musk are “mediocre” (“two repulsive and mediocre oligarchs”), a comment that elicited more snickers than your local candy shop stocks.  

It turns out that, like the House of the Lord, Donald Trump is a house with many mansions. You go to his rallies, and he is in rah-rah-cheerleading mode. He works the crowd. The enthusiasm among the tens of thousands of people is palpable. He is a master of off-the-cuff paratactic delivery and what the rhetoricians call aposiopesis. It’s a digressive performance long on anecdote, careless of specificity. Its aim is emotional uplift. It doesn’t work on Rachel Maddow, David French, Bill Kristol or other members of that coven. On Trump’s base, however, it is like a magic spell. “Too much is not enough,” William Blake once said.  That’s what Trump’s fans think.  

But at Bedminster, Trump’s manner was sober and deliberate, his speech full of statistics and other particulars. One large focus of his remarks was inflation. The prices of food, energy and housing have skyrocketed under the Biden-Harris administration. That is hardly surprising, since its “Inflation Reduction Act” was really a “prosperity reduction act.” You cannot pour billions of fictitious dollars — dollars that the government simply prints, as if the US dollar were Monopoly money — without causing prices to spike.  

Ditto on energy. If you attack “fossil fuels,” you are going to make those fuels more expensive. What the world needs now, as the energy expert Robert Bryce has observed, is cheap, abundant energy, period, full stop, end of sentence, end of discussion. All the talk about windmills and solar energy and climate change are just so many “luxury beliefs,” promoted by people who do not (for the moment, anyway) need to worry about the effect of their utopian schemes on the rest of society.

Trump understands this, which is why, when asked what he would do on day one when reelected, he included “drill, baby, drill” among the two things he would do right away. 

The second thing had two parts: seal the border and begin dealing with the millions of  people who are here illegally.  

The nice counterpoint to Trump’s press conference, at which he not only spoke at length but also answered questions from reporters at length, was the announcement of Kamala Harris’s economic plan. Wage and price controls? She has ’em. Higher taxes, you betcha. $25,000 payment from the government for people wanting to buy a house? Why not? The whole plan was awash in discredited socialist nostrums, so much so that Trump referred to the plan as a “Maduro” or Soviet-style economic plan. If enacted it would surely transform the United States into a gigantic Venezuela, though the jury is still out on whether that would be the explicit intention of the people responsible or merely a byproduct of their stupidity.  

I recommend that Trump skeptics as well as Trump fans consult his most recent press conference. He covered a lot of ground, demonstrated an impressive command of exigent policy issues and even reflected on his personal style as a politician. One reporter asked whether he shouldn’t drop the personal attacks against Biden-Harris and concentrate of policy issues. Well, he said, keep in mind the wholesale attacks on me — attacks, he continued, that include trying to put me in jail. The bottom line here was his admission that he had to do things his way. It had worked well so far, so why not keep doing it? 

I thought there was a lot to that. Among other things, it reminded me that there is a little bit of Frank Sinatra in Donald Trump. Both insist on doing things their way. If the media were not so Trump-phobic, they would celebrate his style, not disparage it. The honeymoon for Kamala is already getting on its way to the trash can. The more the public sees of her — and believe me, Trump’s team will make sure that we see a lot of her — the more it will recoil. They do not want a candidate who wants to defund the police, extend Medicare to illegal aliens or allow non-citizens to vote. And that is just the tip of the iceberg. We haven’t even delved into Tampon Tim’s repellent record. Even with the tsunami of media cheerleading for Kamala, most polls still have Trump ahead. By October 1, he will have a commanding lead an will, whatever the pundits say now, win easily. The main question is just how long his coattails will be.