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Romney’s Anti-Trump Speech a Rousing Success
Earlier today, politicos across America proclaimed that Mitt Romney’s speech denouncing Donald Trump was a complete bust. Morning Consult polled Republicans and found that the broadside had barely moved the needle in the race:
Thirty-one percent of GOP voters said they were more likely to vote for Trump, while 20 percent said less likely, and 43 percent said it had no impact either way.
The poll, which was conducted March 4 through March 6, also finds that only five percent of Trump supporters said they are now less likely to vote for Trump. And, of those who voted for Romney in 2012, 30 percent said they were more likely to vote for Trump, compared to 20 percent who said less likely. Nearly half (48 percent) said it wouldn’t affect their vote either way.
The 2012 GOP nominee is the foremost representative of the loathed establishment, so it’s no surprise that his University of Utah speech didn’t change the minds of angry voters. But, of course, that wasn’t the purpose of Romney’s speech. Likewise, Marco Rubio’s mockery and Ted Cruz’s lawyerly deconstruction of The Donald weren’t primarily designed to make the Trumpenproletariat abandon their leader. Instead, they wanted to get inside Trump’s OODA Loop.
The OODA Loop
While in the US Air Force, fighter pilot Col. John R. Boyd created a decision-making model which allowed American pilots to dominate every dogfight. Marshaling his exhaustive knowledge of big thinkers from Sun Tzu to Werner Heisenberg, Boyd determined that victory isn’t merely a matter of superior technology and firepower. More important are brainpower, decisiveness, and fast choices.
OODA stands for Observation, Orientation, Decision, Action. The pilot must quickly observe the conditions, orient his jet before the opponent does, decide upon a plan, and then act against the enemy’s weakness. The faster through this cycle, the better. After the pilot’s initial decisive act, he immediately observes the new environment, re-orients himself, decides a second move, and acts on it. By employing this framework, Boyd promised he could best any of his fellow pilots despite starting a mock battle in a vulnerable position. He achieved his goal every time in less than 40 seconds.
The OODA loop is as applicable to business and politics as it is to dogfights. If you run a tech company, success isn’t merely having the best product, being fastest to market, or having the largest marketing budget. Those are helpful, but the essential element is to outmaneuver the competition. By taking fast, decisive action, you can get inside your opponent’s OODA loop, which Boyd said will “make us appear ambiguous, [and] thereby generate confusion and disorder.”
Getting Inside Trump’s OODA Loop
Until the past couple of weeks, Donald Trump has been the only candidate generating confusion and disorder. Always on offense, the media covers him non-stop, whether it’s for the petty insult of the day, a false claim, or strange behavior. When the news channels do cover his rivals, they mostly ask the candidates about Trump’s latest outrage. Nearly all of his opponents’ decisions have been defensive, responding to the frontrunner.
But as anyone who has watched The Donald knows, he is an insecure and undisciplined man who can’t resist responding to any perceived slight — often in embarrassing ways. So Rubio mocked his finger size … to which the Donald assured a vast debate audience that he had a large penis. Rubio exposed the Trump University scam … to which The Donald lied about an “A” rating from the Better Business Bureau which had actually granted it a D-minus. He spent days on Twitter calling the Florida senator a “leightweight” and a “chocker,” fueling even more mockery.
Around the time Rubio was taking it to The Donald, Romney demanded that Trump release his taxes and implied that the multizillionaire was hiding a far less impressive net worth. Trump responded in a long Twitter rant with more insults and over-the-top boasts about his financial acumen. Then Mitt implied The Donald might be hiding financial mismanagement and business failures. Trump jumped on the airwaves to respond, his face red with anger as he lied about his bankruptcies and hiring foreign workers. The press couldn’t help but explain the scandals to their viewers.
Then came March 3, the morning of a crucial debate in the delegate-rich state of Michigan: The ideal time for Mitt to really rattle the GOP frontrunner. Instead of resting up or doing debate prep, Trump watched Mitt’s speech denouncing him, then hastily staged a shouty, rambling speech of his own. He called in to talk shows and spoke of Mitt “dropping to his knees” for him. He again took to Twitter, focused entirely on a man who isn’t running against him. By the time the debate began, Trump was tired, peevish, and completely off his game.
Rubio and Cruz observed this fact, reoriented, decided on new attacks, and acted with vigor.
I’m sure Mitt and Marco would be happy if their attacks on Trump had convinced his fans to abandon their hero and join one of his rivals. They would have loved to see his poll numbers plummet overnight and his frontrunner status collapse like Herman Cain’s did in the 2012 race. But that wasn’t their primary goal.
Instead, they wanted to get inside Trump’s OODA loop, put him on the defensive for the first time in this campaign, and force him into costly mistakes. And, in that, they succeeded.
Published in General
Hoyacon, I encourage you to learn a bit about the Massachusetts health care situation before you continue retailing nonsense.
“Instead, they wanted to get inside Trump’s OODA loop, put him on the defensive for the first time in this campaign, and force him into costly mistakes. And, in that, they succeeded.”
Jon, I agree with the exception of the word costly. The idea of anything Trump saying or doing being costly to him is clearly wrong.
His supporters have valid reasons for sticking to him despite his vulgar incoherence. They are in no way put off by it. They believe he will improve their financial lot in life by breathing new life into their dying industries.
Joe and Mika are so naive!
He is free money to the media today but the instant he is nominated they will turn on him in ways that will make Mitt and Marco blush.
Trump’s been getting in the mid-30s pretty much everywhere.
In the latest national poll, he’s at 27%.
Cruz, Kasich, Rubio at 25, 24, and 23. This could not be closer… for everyone!
(Rubio’s in last place! He should drop out!)
Seriously, something evidently has happened to Trump. He’s not done. But he’s far from inevitable, too.
Not RNC, he is part of the GOPe hive mind.
Duane, I’m going to need an explanation for that one–not of the Mass. situation–but why you think I need to know more about it. I think that you may have misconstrued my post (?). Would one of these have helped [ :)]?
I heard that the mailed-in ballots were what put Trump over the top this past weekend (as noted also by Austin Murray in comment 16), not the ballots registered on the voting day, which suggested to me that Trump’s support was weakening.
I don’t think it was all Romney. Trump did himself in Thursday night in that debate: (1) Well, sometimes we have to hire H1Bs for “seasonal work.” (2) We have to keep the brains [from the foreign students who have studied here] from leaving. (3) I’m flexible. Good leaders are flexible.
When he got to point 3, I imagined sneakers being thrown at television sets all around the country by his betrayed supporters who are looking for a hard line on these things.
Then making matters worse, his “Little Marco” stuff made him sound deranged. That loss of composure, I think, was Romney’s doing. :) :)
And then, to top it all off, Trump dodged CPAC. :)
I think CPAC was probably big. With his kind of campaign, he has to be ready to walk into every lion’s den and come back out on his own feet. The last minute cancellation might have made him look weak to supporters.
I have a friend who was the vice president of a local bank. We were on a committee trying to improve our local schools. We were talking one day about how businesses implemented programs like Six Sigma to change the culture to one of excellence. He said his bank had recently run a very successful program, putting posters and coffee mugs everywhere that said, “We will exceed the customer’s expectations.” I asked him, “Why can’t we do that in schools?” He said, “You can’t because, truthfully, we were able to move people around or out who didn’t improve.”
This is where Trump is going to be undone. And why he was so flustered in the debate. A CEO can take some dramatic steps that a president cannot take. He thinks they are the same thing, but the roles and working methods are different.
What we saw Thursday night was Trump under pressure. That’s how he is going to behave when he is frustrated. And I can’t help thinking Romney pressured him on purpose.
That behavior is not conducive to getting the best solution proposals, it will chase away the top talent from the team, and it could very well lead to disaster.
Semi-off topic, but this is why it’s so hard to change things. I can’t remember how many times over the years I was in a department suddenly told to cut their budget by 10%. Sometimes multiple years of that. It never happens in government.
I’m pro-life and it’s an issue I care deeply about it. If I’d watched a candidate I support 1) admit he hadn’t actually shown concern for life in his personal actions, 2) flip-flop publicly on stage, 3) praise a pro-choice opponent’s argument (as Trump did Rubio’s on Gang of Eight), and 4) tell me the whole point was flexibility, I would have been sitting with my head in my hands in total disbelief. And a press release flip-flopping back the next day wouldn’t have won me back, either.
I thought that debate was brutal for him, and that Romney and Rubio set it up, and Cruz helped drive it home. And Kasich got to ride along free. Not impressed with Kasich. But whatever.
We could go way off topic on that insight…
Were those easily-downsized departments fully staffed by union members?
These were head-office, operating departments in banks or big corporations doing a variety of things. For example, managing the acquisition of new computer hardware and tracking/managing data centers with tens of thousands of servers. Most of the cuts involved laying off staff.
yaay!
I agree, although Trump did get a couple of major endorsements after Romney spoke.
One of my first thoughts was that Romney was, in a way, giving an ‘establishment’ nod, perhaps the first, to Ted Cruz.
I hear today that he’s recorded robocalls for Kasich and Rubio, and has offered to do so for Cruz. I am not sure if Cruz has accepted the offer.
I get that too much support from Mitt may be problematic, and why one candidate may accept it and another may decline it. But at this point I’ll give Romney credit for taking what appears to be a principled stand and for following up, so far at least, in a pretty evenhanded manner. This distinguishes him from almost all of the rest of the Republican establishment.
That is correct. Cruz actually won the voters who cast their ballots on election day.
I have to call a penalty :) on you for bringing up abortion when discussing Trump. As various Trump supporters have repeated ad nauseum, Ann Coulter most famously, only immigration matters, and Trump could perform abortions in the White House for all she cares.
But there isn’t really any new information on Trump, just more attention to him, but not in the positive.
So those voters who cast their vote already: if they regret it, they regret it. But they made a free choice.
Everyone who has not voted yet gets to think a little longer, and decide in the same way.
Usually the people who vote early have an outsized say in the decision. This time they might get left behind as conditions change after their vote. You pays your money and you takes your chance.
Well, Pencil, at least I know you are still sane. I thought we’d lost you for a minute.
xxoo
That’s precisely why I’m using abortion… I’m trying to put myself in their shoes. I’m thinking that if immigration is your #1 issue you’d have to respond to your candidate going all over the place like that about as well as I would to the above on abortion.
I realize many Trump supporters detest the rest of the field so much it might not matter. But this had to be pretty bad.
whoa. nelly.
no one look that up. it be grossGrossGROSS.
I think that everybody missed the point of Romney’s speech.
It should be obvious, from the 2008 and 2012 campaigns, that Romney is a secret Democratic Party operative. He weakened McCain in 2008, giving us Obama, and then threw the election to Obama in 2012.
He gave his speech last week in an effort to stop Trump’s momentum. Note that he didn’t even endorse one of the other candidates. He urged people to vote for whatever candidate, other than Trump, would deny Trump a victory in their state. This is a recipe for a brokered convention.
A brokered convention will deny the nomination to Trump, who will then run as a third party candidate, delivering the election to Clinton.
This is clearly Romney’s plan. He’s in the tank for Obama and the Clintons.
[Just kidding.]
I agree.
Trump thinks the media’s red carpet will continue through the light to the White House on the other side. He always tells us how ‘great’ they are.
But this is what the media has in store for Trump’s campaign on July 22.
Of course, the media has a graveyard planned for any Republican Campaign. But Trump somehow thinks he is different.
Who? Did I miss someone? I thought Christie and Sessions had already endorsed, but maybe I lost track of the timeline. I know Gingrich and Huckabee have made people think they’re going that way.
Yes — it was sort of like Graham’s “he’s in my party and Trump is not” statement. It’s the kind of thing that could be very important down the road.
That’s basically my take. It seems pretty clear that Romney is genuinely planning to do whatever it takes to stop Trump. I did read that he said he’d probably endorse a candidate on March 16th. And he said that would have to do with the shape of the race. In short, whoever he considers the most plausible not-Trump once we see what Florida and Ohio leave us.
Just a question…and I don’t have the answer. I’m honestly curious. Can Trump and his campaign pull together a credible 3rd party run in a little over 3 months if the convention doesn’t nominate him? Are there logistical hurdles that can’t be overcome? Will he be able to be on the ballot in enough states? Has someone looked at this in detail?
I think the process to get on the ballot closes up around April 1st. He would have to get on as the candidate for one of the existing parties. Libertarian is on in all 50 states, but they will have their own candidate. Not sure if any of the others are. Reform party maybe.
Ok, so Trump or anyone else wanting to go third party needs to jump ship by April 1. Well, actually, have started to jump ship, and have the paperwork done by April 1.
In that case, keep them all busy and wondering, until April 1.
So, it sounds like if a brokered convention nominates someone other than Trump in mid-July it’s too late for Trump to mount a 3rd-party challenge. Do I have that right?