Galen: The Five Stages of Trump

(Rich Galen, Mullings) – In 1969, Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross published “On Death and Dying” in which she described the five stages of grief:

Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.

Herewith are the five stages of Trump:

Denial: Along with everyone else, maybe including Donald Trump himself, I loudly proclaimed Trump was a carnival sideshow. And, like a sideshow after we had been tricked into paying a quarter to go inside the tent once, we would not be fooled again and his act would wither and die.

In June 2015, I wrote:

Trump is not a serious candidate for President, but he can afford to be a raspberry seed in the tooth of this campaign season.

The Denial Champion of 2016 has to be Gov. John Kasich who maintains that his single victory (in his home state of Ohio) proves that the Republican party is desperate for him to be its nominee.

Anger: In July of 2015, Trump was in Iowa and said of Sen. John McCain:

He’s a war hero because he was captured? I like people that weren’t captured, OK?”

Like most people, I was outraged at that remark and, like most people pronounced, the Trump campaign officially over at that point.

The whole “wall” thing with Mexico was cringe worthy. His pronouncement that Muslims should be denied entry to the US for any reason – vacations, lectures, shopping – was embarrassing.

We’re not even going to get into his Megyn Kelly/Carly Fiorina stuff because it won’t make it through the Mullings Director of Standards & Practices screen.

Bargaining: I was confident that Trump’s appeal was to a minority of the minority. I remember pulling out my slide rule and saying: If he gets 30 percent of the GOP vote and only 23 percent of voters claim to be Republicans, that’s 30 percent of 23 percent or about seven percent of the voting population.

I got to be like the GPS in my car, recalculating and recalculating as his winning percentages continued to grow and grow until they hit 60 percent in the New York Primary.

Listening to him call into one cable news program after another, I decided he was beginning to sound more reasonable only because I’d heard it all so many times before. And, when Paul Manafort told the member of the Republican National Committee that Trump had been “playing a part” I was happy to believe him.

Trump, on the other hand, was apparently not so happy to hear his campaign’s senior advisor compare the campaign to a scene from William Shakespeare’s “As You Like It”:

All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts.

Depression: When the 2016 Presidential campaign began there were 17 Republican candidates. One by one they dropped out: Bush, Perry, Walker, Huckabee, Rubio.

As the field was winnowed, it became more and more likely that Donald Trump would be among the last candidates standing. He kept winning: The Northeast, the Southeast, the Super Tuesday states, the Acela Primary states.

In the five primaries last Tuesday, the New York Times pointed out “His routs represented a breakthrough: He received more than half the vote in every state” including the states of confusion and, ultimately, the state of depression.

Acceptance: Resume attached.

Mr. Galen is a veteran political strategist and communications consultant.  He blogs at www.Mullings.com.