S.E. Cupp: Trump campaign looking like empty performance art

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“Is Donald Trump trying to lose?”

The text came late Tuesday night, from a friend in New York who is not involved in politics.

To outside observers, who haven’t been covering Trump and Co.’s outrageous outbursts and offensive smears on an hourly basis, and the impressive contortions the campaign performs to explain away, defend or indeed exploit Trump’s absurd proclamations, this must seem like a hoax, or something out of Andy Kaufman. This guy can’t actually be trying to win an election.

After all, what serious person running for president in 21st century America (and polite society) would think it a good idea to attack a judge’s fairness simply because he is Mexican? Especially since that judge is actually an American from Indiana?

Only, you’d think, a person performing a social experiment to see how far one must go to be summarily rejected into irrelevance.

But whether Trump is playing for the White House or just playing us all, his cartoonish smearing of a federal district judge is at best a laughable attempt at convincing his supporters that somehow Trump University would not be in legal trouble if not for “Mexicans,” and at worst a naked appeal to aggrieved white nationalists who have a new boogeyman in Gonzalo Curiel.

But one thing few people have focused on, and that Trump must think we’re too stupid to notice, is that this line of attack exposes one of his own biggest claims as total bull.

Trump has for months insisted that, despite all of his bigoted rhetoric against Hispanics, he will win the Hispanic vote. “The Hispanics love me,” he says. “The Latinos love Trump, and I love them,” he tells reporters from his golf course in Virginia.

Remove your skeptical spectacles for a second, and pretend that is the case — if so, why would Curiel have a problem with Trump? He is Hispanic — does he not love him? By Trump’s logic, Curiel — because he is Hispanic — should be on the Trump train, and his only so-called “conflict of interest” should be that he’s a rabid Trump supporter.

Needless to say, I have no idea who Curiel is voting for in November. But what I do know is that Hispanics do not in fact love Trump. In a Washington Post/Univision poll, 8 out of 10 Latinos viewed Trump unfavorably. I guess, despite his taco bowl tweet, they didn’t like being called rapists and criminals after all. Weird.

Trump has blown his cover. He knows his language is bigoted, and that Hispanics like Curiel are likely offended by it. But he’s made the calculation that winning white men is more important.

That might not turn out too well. He will need a full 70 percent of white male voters to have a shot at winning, a larger percentage than any Republican has ever won before. Even David Duke probably can’t help Donald turn out that many.

So in case there were any disaffected white guys who hadn’t heard Trump’s pitch that President Obama is Kenyan, that Jews are good negotiators, that women who confront him are “bimbos,” that Hillary Clinton is “disgusting” for using the bathroom, and that all Muslims should be banned, he’s tripling down on his white-man outreach, telling his surrogates to run with the judge attacks.

A few weeks ago, his campaign chairman Paul Manafort told the Huffington Post that Trump wasn’t considering any women or minorities for vice president. Trump has openly bashed a number of the GOP’s most influential Hispanics and women, including Sens. Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley and New Mexico Governor Susana Martinez, making it likely only a white man would take the job anyway.

Trump wouldn’t be the first to run a campaign explicitly for white guys. The No Nothings ran anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic candidates to appeal to Protestant men, with platforms to bar immigrants from city jobs and keep Chinese people from testifying against white men in courts.

Following his 1958 defeat in the Democratic primary for governor of Alabama, George Wallace, previously endorsed by the NAACP, became a segregationist. When asked why, he said, “You know, I tried to talk about good roads and good schools and all these things that have been part of my career, and nobody listened. And then I began talking about n—–s, and they stomped the floor.”

But demographics are no longer kind to white nationalist campaigns like Trump’s. And with his attacks on Gonzalo Curiel, he’s inadvertently admitting he knows Hispanics (and other minorities) are offended by him, and are not likely to vote for him. So what’s the play? If this whole thing is just performance art, Trump better figure out a finale, quick.

Contact Cupp at thesecupp.com.

This column originally appeared in the New York Daily News.

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