On June 25, Axios’s Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei took readers inside Donald Trump’s “winning, cynical plan.” They argued that “the more President Trump does, says and tweets outrageous things, the more his critics go bananas and the better he does in the polls.” …
“It’s arguably the most cynical strategy imaginable,” write Allen and VandeHei. “But that doesn’t mean it can’t be successful politically.”
I should say at the outset: I believe Allen and VandeHei have this one wrong. I don’t think Trump’s poll numbers show he’s found a successful political strategy — quite the opposite, in fact. But this is a difficult debate to have because it requires defining what success would look like for Trump, which means settling on some counterfactual sense of where Trump’s poll numbers could and should be. CONT.
Ezra Klein, Vox