Military Strategist Explains Why Trump Leads—and Will Fail

7/25/2019 Military Strategist Explains Why Trump Leadsand Will Fail

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12/20/2015 Military Strategist Explains Why Trump LeadsAnd Will Fail

http://thefederalist.com/2015/12/16/military-strategist-explains-why-donald-trump-leads-and-how-he-will-fail/

2016

Military StrategistExplains Why Donald

Trump LeadsAnd How

He Will FailAir Force fighter pilot John Boyd's theory about confounding opponents with a constantly

shifting battlefield applies to Donald Trump and all GOP aspirants.

No matter how much you dislike Donald Trump and his effect on the Republican

presidential primary raceand there are many, many good reasons to do soyou

have to spare a little grudging admiration for the sheer madcap genius of Trumps

ability to disrupt, unsettle, and exploit the primary system.

We can better understand what Trump has done successfully, as well as his

ultimate limitations as a candidate and why he would be such a terrible president,

using the ideas of military strategic theorist John Boyd. Trump has been, thus far,

the true Boyd candidate in this race, yet he is already exhibiting symptoms of

precisely the flaws that Boyd saw as fatal in combatants.

Observe, Orient, Decide, Act

Boyd, an Air Force fighter pilot, Vietnam and Korea veteran, and fighter design

engineer, is best known for the OODA Loop or decision cycle, a concept he

developed as part of a broader study of patterns of conflict in the 1970s and

1980s later widely adopted in the military, especially the U.S. Marine Corps. OODA

stands for ObserveOrientDecideAct, and refers to the process by which soldiers

in combator humans engaged in any form of conflictabsorb information,

make decisions, and act on them. Boyd illustrated this with a graph:

Boyds theories were complex, constantly evolving, and never formally written

down in one place in his lifetimehe preferred to play Socrates, and let others be

Platoso they are often oversimplified. But for present purposes, four
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http://thefederalist.com/2015/12/16/military-strategist-explains-why-donald-trump-leads-and-how-he-will-fail/ 2

generalizations will do.

First, operational tempospeedlies at the core of Boyds theory of conflict, and

has been the most influential element of his thinking, both in the military and in

how the concept of a decision cycle has seeped into our popular vocabulary.

(Indeed, Boyd first made his name in the Air Force as 40Second Boyd, a fighter

jock with a standing bet that he could get on any opponents tail in 40 seconds.

Many took the bet; he never had to pay up.)

Boyds core insight was about the interactive and disruptive nature of speed on

human decisionmaking: success in conflict can be rapid and dramatic if one can

operate inside the OODA Loop of the opponent. Operating inside the opponents

OODA Loop means presenting him with a constantly shifting battlefield that keeps

him offbalance and disoriented so he is unable to process information and make

and implement sound decisions before the situation changes again.

Put another way, you dont just make better or faster decisions than your

opponent, you can disrupt the opponents ability to make realitybased decisions

if you can continuously change the reality before he has time to react to it.

If action flows nearly instantaneously from orientation, the quickness of the overall

loop is accelerated. This relative acceleration will shorten, or seemingly compress the

time an adversary has to reorient in response to what is happening in his

environment. Boyd contended that in competitive situation, be it combat, sports or

debate, the opponent with the relatively quicker loop will, at times, have a more

relevant picture of the unfolding situation because he or she is shaping it rather than

being forced to adapt to it. This mismatch in orientation can provide a fleeting

opportunity for the quicker side to continue to act to exploit the effects of the first

move, before the slower side understands what is happening. If the quicker side can

maintain this mismatch, the slower side will become increasingly disconnected from

the environment and their actions will become increasingly unrelated to the actual

situation. They will be driven solely by perception. As this process continues, the

relatively slower side continues to generate increasingly irrelevant observations,

leading to more disconnected decisions, and so forth. The relatively slower sides loop

will fold back in on itself as confusion and disorder increase; generating an internally
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When combined

with speed,

ambiguity plays acrucial role in the

OODA Loop in

keeping the

opponent from

becoming oriented

as a result of his

focused close loop.

Boyd referred to the concept of using your own actions to dictate what the enemy

knows, and therefore does, as implicit guidance.

But Boyd did not stress speed for the sake of speed, in the form of simply actingfaster than the opponent. Indeed, a successful Boydian approach will sometimes

lead to the opponentincreasing his tempo in a panic, thus leading to further

breakdowns in his ability to make sound decisions on adequate information and

implement them cohesively.

To use a football analogy, the point is to have a quarterback who can quickly read

the field, be prepared to make a quick release upon spotting the best opportunity,

and force the defense into a reactive mode due to the QBs ability to quickly

reshape the fieldnota quarterback who heaves the ball downfield the instant he

touches it without setting his feet and spotting an open man.

The Strategic Value of Ambiguity

Second, a crucial concept in Boyds work is ambiguity. An opponent who wishes to

counter your approach will want to ascertain your intentions, capabilities, andmovements, and respond accordingly. It becomes much more difficult to do this if

you are able to keep your intentions and actions unclear to the opponent for as

long as possible.

Indeed, the ideal Boydian approach is to keep the

opponent so confused he isnt really sure who hes

fighting, where the battlefield begins or ends, or even

if hes in a fight at all! This is not a novel conceptits

as old as Sun Tzubut when combined with speed,

ambiguity plays a crucial role in the OODA Loop in

keeping the opponent from becoming oriented as a

result of his observations.

One of the most devious and successful practitioners


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observations.

Each combatantwill orient around

the same

observations

differently based on

his own experience,

heritage, and

cluster ofpreconceptions.

of ambiguity today is Vladimir Putin. From Ukraine to

Georgia to Syria to the Baltics, Putin has shown again and again the ability to

expand his influence while using secrecy, disinformation, and incrementalism to

keep his potential opponents from becoming sufficiently oriented to make a

decision and translate it into action.

While the Wests foreign policy apparatus continues to debate what exactly Putin

wants, what he is doing, whether he is doing himself more harm than good, and

even whether he is in some ways on our side, Putin is constantly reshaping the

reality on the ground in ways that conform to his own ideas about his objectives.

Getting Enemies Into Their Unconscious Reflexes

Third, Boyd stressed that much of the OODA process occurs beyond consciousthought, and draws on things like reflex, training, memory, cultural background,

and personal experience. This is most obvious in Boyds concept of orientation as

a process that filters observations and tends to fit them into preexisting mental

models or frameworks of narrative and pattern recognition (in militaries, this

tends to include a particular militarys doctrine).

The result is that each combatant will orient around

the same observations differently based on his own

experience, heritage, and cluster of preconceptions. It

also stands out in the realm of action, especially

action in physical forms of conflict like combat and

sports. Because of the need for splitsecond decisions

at the ground level, armies fight as they train, teams

play as they practice.

For our purposes, the same thing can be true of

political candidates on the trail. They are confronted with so many situations

calling for them to address some new event, public policy argument, or cultural

divide (in debates, interviews, town halls, fundraisers, and retail rope lines) that

they could never possibly hope to respond to them all with thoughtful and

considered original answers.


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The OODA Loop

itself is a dynamic

rather than linear

process.

So they fall back on memorized texts (stump speeches, talking points, favorite

anecdotes and jokes), their ideological instincts and party platforms, and things

that have worked for them in the past. When cornered, they may retreat to their

happy placewar record, humble origins story, defeat of a despised foe, talent for

baiting hecklers or the media, agitation of economic or racial resentments,

whatever has gotten them out of jams in the past.

hen Participants Dont Evolve to Fit Reality

Fourth, all of Boyds theories center around dynamic systems, i.e., systems in which

all the elements affect all the others continuously, and change is constant. The

OODA Loop itself is a dynamic rather than linear process, as the many circleback

lines on Boyds chart illustrate.

For example, the combatant may affect the situation

merely by observing it, and decision is merely a

hypothesis that will be tested and refined based on

how additional observations are collected and how

the decisionmaker becomes oriented around them.

The ability of each combatant to affect the others OODA Loop is, of course, key to

the idea of getting inside the others Loop and using implicit guidance to collapse

his ability to make sound or realitybased decisions.

More broadly, Boyd stressed the difference between open and closed systems of

conflict and the need for open systems of OODA to deal with the former (which

are the norm in human conflict).

Consider a simple video game like PacMan: the game operates according toprogrammed rules and will function in a predictable way, so the more times you

play, the more you learn to process the feedback the game gives you and turn it

into actions that improve your chances of winning. The game is a closed system,

and a veteran player can beat it with a closed system of observing, orienting,

deciding, and acting, fitting each new observation into a set of preconceptions

about how the games rules and winning strategies operate.


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But most forms of human conflict are open systemsthe rules and conditions are

not only constantly changing, but also reacting continuously to how you approach

them. The opponent may be trying to get insideyourOODA Loop; the terrain on

which the conflict rages may be expanding or contracting; the available tools and

technologies and cultural presuppositions may be evolving; new combatants may

be entering or leaving the fray. Because the conditions are an open system, theOODA process must also be open and evolving, rather than falling back on the kind

of fixed expectations that come rationally with repeating conflict in a closed

system like playing PacMan:

Incestuous amplification occurs when ones preconceptions misshape the

observations that one is sensing. These misshapen observations then blur the true

connection between the individual and the environment because the brain begins to

synthesize cues and preconceived responses. Viewed abstractly, incestuous

amplification hijacks the orientation of an individuals OODA loop by overriding

actual observations to a point where the subsequent orientation induces the

individual to perceive and act on what he or she wants to see rather than what

actually is. First order effects of this disconnect may be initially too small to measure

thanks in part to luck, chance, or ambiguity. However, if the cycle continues unabated,

subsequent actions continue to induce dysfunctional behavior back into the entire

OODA loop, which then folds back on itself to magnify the mismatchthe effectis a

little like placing a microphone next a speaker when recording, only much more

dangerous.This kind of positive feedback loop essentially forms a closed system. Left

uncorrected, the individual exhibiting an incestuously amplifying OODA loop becomes

increasingly disconnected from his or her environmentIncestuous amplification has

the effect of closing off the system from its environmentwithout a correction or

change that opens the deciders OODA loop to an effective communication with the

real world, the only uncertainty in the outcome is how long an OODA loop driven madby incestuous amplification can last before it degenerates into chaos, confusion, and

disorder.

Chaos, confusion and disorder sounds like a lot of what we have seen thus far in

the Republican primaries.
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Unable to discern

Trumps intentions

in May, June, and

July, his opponents

were tentative inreaching decisions

and putting them

into action.

June 2015: Enter Trump

So, what does this all have to do with Donald Trump? Quite a lot. Few candidates

in recent political memory have been so effective at altering the reality around

them in a way that crashes their opponents OODA Loops.

mbiguity: Freezing The Opposition

Lets start with ambiguity. Trump has been flirting with electoral politics so long,

he was asked in an interview with Rona Barrett in 1980 about his possible interest

in running for president someday, and Larry King asked him at the 1988 GOP

convention if he would have accepted an invitation to be George H.W. Bushs

running mate. He joined H. Ross Perots Reform Party in 1999and even ran

briefly in its primaries for the 2000 electionbefore bowing out and watching thenomination go to Pat Buchanan.

Trump ziggedhe declared that he identified as a

Democrat as recently as 2004, donated significant

sums of money to Hillary Clintonand other

Democrats despised by rankandfile Republicans,

and had glowing words for Hillaryand President

Obama. He zaggedhe confronted Obama so directly

over his birthplace in 2011 that Obama felt compelled

to finally publicly release his Hawaiian birth

certificate, and he endorsed Mitt Romney in the 2012

primaries, saying that ifRomney were the nominee, Trump would not stage his

own thirdparty bid in 2012.

Given his long and erratic history, loose party loyalty, and propensity to bluff,

Trumps competitors for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination were quite

reasonably conditioned to view talk of a Trump 2016 campaign, and even his June

16 announcement, with uncertainty: was it another publicity stunt? A runup to a

Perotstyle third party campaign? A stalking horse for some hidden agenda? A

personal vendetta against Jeb Bush? Or a real effort to win the Republican

nomination?
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/donald-trump-announces-2016-presidential-campaign-make-country/story?id=31799741http://www.cnn.com/2012/02/02/politics/campaign-wrap/http://www.buzzfeed.com/andrewkaczynski/trump-on-obama-in-2009-i-think-hes-doing-a-really-good-jobhehttp://hotair.com/archives/2015/06/17/trump-2007-hillarys-very-very-capable-her-health-care-plan-is-very-good/http://www.politico.com/story/2015/06/donald-trump-donations-democrats-hillary-clinton-119071http://www.cnn.com/2015/07/21/politics/donald-trump-election-democrat/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reform_Party_presidential_primaries,_2000#Trump_enters_racehttp://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/stories/1999/10/25/trump.cnn/index.htmlhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Usb0iE5WiZIhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5VEjF1uhYo


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Jeb was

conditioned to feara Trump third-party

run as a larger

threat than a

Trump run as a

Republican.

Unable to discern Trumps intentions in May, June, and July, his opponents were

tentative in reaching decisions and putting them into action. To the extent that he

maintains the thirdparty threat to this day, it provides him a screen of ambiguity

that protects him against attacks other candidates would have to face. Nobody

worries that Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio or Jeb Bush will leave the party in a snit and

launch a thirdparty bid; Trumps credible threat of doing so makes primary

opponents think twice about attacking him in ways they would not hesitate to

attack loyal Republicans whose intent to abide by primary outcomes is clear.

Subconscious Orientation: The Giant Sucking Sound

As Boyd would predict, personal history formed the mental models that figured

into the candidates assessments of the thirdparty threat. For Jeb Bush, 1992 hadto loom large: a populist billionaire fond of ranting against trade with Mexico

barges into the race as a thirdparty candidate, splitting off the Buchananist chunk

of the GOP base and handing a national election from the Bush family to the

Clinton family.

So, from the outset, Jeb was conditioned to fear a

Trump thirdparty run as a larger threat than a

Trump run as a Republican. In the early going,

therefore, Jebs natural orientation was to back away

from conflict that might further antagonize Trump.

Three GOP contendersMarco Rubio, Rick Perry,

and Chris Christiehad a different history. All three

had faced down thirdparty challenges and won: Christie knocked off a sitting

Democratic governor despite a thirdparty challenge from the Right (who was

suspected of being a stalking horse for the Democrats), Rubio beat a sitting

Republican governor for a Senate seat in the primary and beat him again when he

ran thirdparty; and Perry won his second reelection in a wild fourway affair

with two independents, one of them celebrity author Kinky Friedman. Perry had

also survived a moderate primary challenge in 2010, but in 2012 he lost to the

establishment favorite, Mitt Romney, in part because Perry was blindsided by


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A key weapon in

2012 was Romneys

SuperPAC, which

delivered barrages

of negative

advertisingconcentrated

against whichever

rival threatened

him most at any

one time.

attacks from his right (mainly by Michele Bachmann) on immigration.

It was therefore Perrypredictably, in hindsightwho disregarded Trumps

shield of ambiguity, seeing him as a threat to be neutralized no matter what he

was up to, and moved first against Trump in August. Perry challenged Trump

directly on immigration and hoped to use the confrontation to shore up his own

credentials on the issue. The Texas gunslinger would find himself walking into a

fatal trap.

Dynamic Systems: Toto, Its Not 2012 Anymore

Perry, himself a former Air Force transport pilot, correctly assessed his

adversarys intentions, but not the way the terrain had shifted from 2012 and how

his opponent was reshaping it to his advantage.

The central dynamic of 2012 was a fairly

conventional one for a Republican primary: a lavishly

funded establishment frontrunner trying to keep

conservative and antiestablishment sentiment

divided among an assortment of insurgents (and one

moremoderatethanthou gadfly) rather than unified

behind a credible headtohead opponent.

A key weapon in 2012 was Romneys SuperPAC,

which delivered barrages of negative advertising

concentrated against whichever rival threatened him

most at any one time. Insurgents like Newt Gingrich

and Rick Santorum also used SuperPACs to funnel a single wealthy supporters

donations into enough TV oxygen to stay on the air despite a narrow donor base.

But the 2016 terrain is different in a number of significant ways. Four involve the

structural dynamics of the field.

First, with 17 candidates who could be described as at least vaguely serious

including eight multiterm governors and five multiterm or sitting senatorsand

no initially dominant frontrunner, the field was inevitably going to involve a


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The field was

inevitably going to

involve a Hobbesian

scramble forresources,

attention, and

support.

Political scientists

have noted the

correlation between

media coverage and

Hobbesian scramble for resources, attention, and support.

Second, the importance of SuperPACs in 2012

concealed their limitations: they can be used for

offensive or defensive TV advertising, but not to keep

a candidates own staff and organization in the field.

Third, the debate system had been overhauled to

limit the number of debates (making them bigger

media events) and put polldriven strictures on who

could be on the main stage, which interacted with the size of the field to mean that

many real candidates would not even make it to the main debate, and that low

early poll standing could become a selffulfilling prophecy, thus accelerating the

tempo needed to survive.

Fourth, the primary season has been compressedvoting starts a month later but

ends at the same time, while the convention is a month earlierso there will be

comparatively little time to raise money and build infrastructure after Iowa and

New Hampshire, putting a premium on early hiring and spending, which in turn

means high burn rates for candidates organizing along traditional lines.

Free Media For the Win

Trump seems to have shrewdly assessed both the terrain and his own capabilities

and realized that the crowded nature of the field meant that the most valuable of

all resources in this context was the one he was most accustomed to commanding:

free media. Trump accumulated a massive advantage in press coverageover the

summer, especially on cable news, with networks often covering his speeches in

their entirety.

One emblematic late August analysis found CNN

giving Trump 78 percent of its GOP campaign

coverage. Hes still at it: an analysis of news in the

days following his proposal earlier this month to ban

Muslim immigration found Trump getting 25 times as
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2015/12/11/edge-trump-gets-25-times-more-media-mentions-than-gop-field-combined.htmlhttp://www.redstate.com/2015/09/16/cnn-spent-78-gop-primary-coverage-trump/http://www.redstate.com/2015/09/01/donald-trump-shows-money-politics-good-thing/


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polling, especially

early in a primary

campaign.

Trump has the

deterrent effect of a

potentially large

self-funded war

chest at the ready,

but he has neverneeded to spend it.

many media mentions as the other 13 Republican

candidates combined.

Political scientists have noted the correlation

between media coverage and polling, especially early in a primary campaign, and

this was bound to have an even larger impact when such a large field meant voters

knew comparatively little about the various contenders. Trump, of course, has

(like Romney) the deterrent effect of a potentially large selffunded war chest at

the ready, but he has never needed to spend it. Hes spent only $217,000 on

campaign ads, compared to $28.9 million by Jeb and between $2 million and $11

million by each of Rubio, Christie, John Kasich, and Ben Carson. No candidate in

recent memory has exploited such an opportunity, and Trumps ability to do so

has altered the battlefield.

Taken in combination, these factors conspiredupon Trumps dive into the deep

end of the pool and initial poll surgeto put immediate stress on all the other

campaigns ability to balance their need for longterm organizational spending

with their fundraising capabilities (which can be limited when a candidate is

polling in single digits in a crowded field) and their need to pay for the kind of

publicity Trump could command for free.

Perry and Scott Walker were the first victims of this.

Unlike leanly staffed campaigns designed for a

candidate who is running to build name recognition

or send a message, Perry and especially Walker were

running to win, and had spent accordingly.

But the early polls kept Perry off the main debatestage, hampering his fundraising. The long game he

played successfully in Texas in 2006 and 2010 wouldnt work. He needed a

successful confrontation with Trump. While his move to denounce Trumps ham

fisted immigration rhetoric was brave and principled, it meant going up against

Trump when he was at the peak of his media saturation.
http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2016-election/47-5-million-cant-buy-these-candidates-love-least-so-n472166http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/trump-boom-or-trump-bubble/http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2015/12/11/edge-trump-gets-25-times-more-media-mentions-than-gop-field-combined.html


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The manner ofRomneys loss and

the paucity of

policy

accomplishments

from the

congressional GOP

exacerbated anti-establishment

sentiment in the

GOP primary

electorate.

The standards of

public mores and

public discourse

have been changing

2016 Is Vastly Different From 2012

It wasnt just timing, however. Four other factors had changed on Perry, and

Trump exploited all of them. Three were in the mood of the voters themselves.

One, the manner of Romneys loss and the paucity of

policy accomplishments from the congressional GOP

exacerbated antiestablishment sentiment in the GOP

primary electorate, spreading to a general distrust of

the whole system and everyone in it.

Two, President Obamas unilateral executive actions

on immigration, and the sensational killing of Kate

Steinle by an illegal immigrant on July 1, dialed up theintensity of the immigration issue, which had never

been a decisive factor in GOP primaries before 2012.

Three, as best symbolized by the shockingly rapid

progress since 2012 of the samesex marriage

political movement, the standards of public mores and public discourse have been

changing in ways and at a pace that is disorienting to a lot of older, more

traditional voters (even voters who may not themselves be especially religious or

socially conservative).

As a result, a chunk of the electorate (at least, people polled as being GOP voters)

was not in a mood for the kind of grownup leadership that traditional Republican

nominees like Romney, McCain, Dole, the Bushes, and Reagan embodied. Instead,

they responded positively when Trump was deliberately outrageous, repeatedly

saying things that werent politically correct.

So when asked to choose between Trump (who had

catered to this type of audience with a similar style in

his years of association with pro wrestlingand who

now barged onto the scene calling Mexicans rapists)

and Perry (who had won six statewide elections in
http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2015/09/14/3701084/donald-trump/


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Cable TV news

networks are facinga downward trend

in ratings. Theyre

not the only ones

under stress.

in ways and at a

pace that is

disorienting to a lot

of older, more

traditional voters.

Texas by carefully balancing toughness on the border

with a welcoming approach to Texas Hispanics),

many were willing to choose confrontational rhetoric

over experience.

Of course, that Buchananite strain has always existed

in the party, and insurgencies like Bachmanns had failed in the recent past. But

for Perry, the financial and structural realities of the new battlefield meant that he

was squeezed out before the fight could go on for long.

The Media Is As Desperate as Base Voters

Thefourthfactor was the media itself, and its susceptibility to being bribed or

bulliednot with cash, but with the currency of Trumps talent for spectacle.Cable TV news networks are facing a downward trend in ratings. Theyre not the

only ones under stresstalk radio has also been facing declining ratings and

advertising rates, in part due to assaults from leftwing socialmedia campaigns

against its advertisers.

Enter Trump, whose theatrical antics are ratings gold

and who is not shy about throwing around the clout

that gives him. He has repeatedly used the high

ratings generated by his appearances to jawbone the

cable news networks over debate formats, including

the unprecedented step of negotiating the CNBC

debate down to two hours, and it seems unlikely hed

be above using similar tactics against talk radio hosts.

In years past, rightleaning talk radio had treated favorably many of the people

running, and many of the leading conservative talkers were people with

movement conservative backgrounds who understood well the principles Trump

treats as fungible. Yet, rightwing talk radio haswith a few honorable exceptions

rallied around Trump, basking in the audiencedriving controversy he brings

with him. When the circus comes to town, everyone wants to be a clown.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/talk-radios-advertising-problem-1423011395https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/as-viewers-drift-is-it-past-prime-time-for-the-cable-news-networks/2015/05/06/6dbba2bc-eeb6-11e4-a55f-38924fca94f9_story.htmlhttp://www.nationaljournal.com/s/74221/return-middle-american-radical


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Trumps operational

tempo left Jeb and

Walker disoriented

and constantly

unable to craft

workable responses.

Trumps ability to spot the medias pressure points and leverage them to his

advantage gave him a decisive edge over Perry and other opponents in the

summer. But a different aspect of Trumps modus operandiwould help him scuttle

his next targetthe no. 2 candidate in the raceand humble the presumptive

frontrunner: the tempo of his assaults on their OODA Loops.

Tempo: Culling the Slow From the Front of the Herd

After Perry, the second candidate to drop would be Walker, one of the early

favorites for the nomination. For the first half of 2015, Jeb and Walker sat first and

second in the national polls, with Walker leading in Iowa and Jeb in New

Hampshire.

By Labor Day, Jeb was in single digits nationally andin the first two states, and Walker was out of money,

dropping out of the race shortly thereafter. Trump

was not the only reason both campaigns crashed and

burned in six weeks, but he was the proximate cause

that sent both spiraling to the ground, brutally

exposing the latent weaknesses in their OODA Loops.

A major reason Trump was able to outflank Walker and Jeb was speed. His

operational tempo left them disoriented and constantly unable to craft workable

responses that kept up with how quickly Trump was reshaping reality around

them.

Traditional political campaigns, no matter how savvy and quickwitted the

candidate may be, rely on layers of political consultants, policy advisers, and

pollsters before making important decisions about their message. There are

completely rational reasons for this. Very few elections are won by a single

message or candidate statement, but a great many are lost by a single one.

Messages are the coin of the realm of politics, but the risk/reward calculus of each

individual message requires careful strategic deliberation. And deliberation takes

time.


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Trumps basic style

is BS, in which he

is interested neither

in the truth nor inlying to his

audience, but just in

riffing on a theme

without much

connection to the

facts.

Insurgent campaigns that lack this level of riskaversion can rise with astonishing

speed because they can create new and distinctive messages at a rapid pace

without the usual deliberation, but they can also implode suddenly and

spectacularly, and political pros are conditioned to wait them out and hope they

do. That gives insurgents a window of opportunity to launch damaging attacks.

But no insurgent in a national election in recent memory has moved as quickly asTrump, or lasted long enough to destroy so many other serious contenders as they

tried to wait him out.

Trumps Unity Isnt Ideas, But Himself

Trumps flingitallatthewall tempo of attacks and messages is unique. It starts

with the fact that essentially everything that comes from the Trump campaign

comes from Trump himself his rambling, streamofconsciousness speeches, his

interviews, his tweets that he clearly writes himself in his distinctive style.

This gives Trumps message approach a remarkable

thematic and stylistic cohesion at any tempo (despite

its underlying incoherence in terms of facts or

principles, neither of which concern him). It extends

to the fact thatbluntly speakingTrumps basic

style is BS, in which he is interested neither in the

truth nor in lying to his audience, but just in riffing on

a theme without much connection to the facts and

certainly without bothering to factcheck anything he

says before he says it. Trump has repeatedly shown

his willingness, to a degree unprecedented in politics,

to heave personal insults at his opponents, mocking their appearance and their

poll standing with putdowns.

These are all approaches Trump has been using for years and years. He didnt

improvise them from study of the battlespace, but just went with what he already

knew how to do. But he was also able to gain unusually rapid traction because

unlike the typical insurgenthe had already been nationally famous for three


16/46



Experiencedpoliticians are

conditioned to see

sticking with a

message as a sign

that its working

and abandoning a

message as a signthat its failing.

decades and a fixture on network television.

(As we shall see throughout this review of Trumps M.O. while he has executed

some shrewd maneuvers, his success thus far says more about his ability to

exploit his adversaries OODA Loops than having a particular mastery of his own.)

Inverting the Campaign Rules about Messaging

Moreover, there are timetested rules for messaging that any campaign veteran

knows: if an attack is winning, you stick with it as long as it keeps delivering

dividends; if youre talking about something thats hurting you, the best approach

is to cut your losses and move on to something else.

Trump regularly inverts this rule, as well, which is

again disorienting for experienced politicians who

are conditioned to see sticking with a message as a

sign that its working and abandoning a message as a

sign that its failing. If Trump taunts his opponent and

feels like hes drawing blood, he bores in with a

rapidly shifting series of attacks.

By the time a campaign like Jebs can work out a

response, Trump has moved on and is hitting him

from a different angle, then another, then another. At least over the short term,

this follows Boyds stress on a varied approach that keeps the opponent

constantly offbalance.

On the other hand, when Trump shoots off his mouth and seems to get himself

into a lot of trouble, he may backtrack slightly or deny what he meant, butinvariably he will dig in and keep talking about it, using stray voltageto bait his

critics into giving him more free media attention (the scarce and valuable

commodity he has hoarded).

This showcases Trumps willingness to be outrageous and his refusal to back

downessential parts of his brand. Again, the mismatch between how Trump
http://www.nationaljournal.com/daily/2014/04/16/pen-phone-stray-voltage


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Jeb ran his last

campaign in 2002,

and the issue

environment and

political mood had

changed a lot since.

reacts and how experienced politicians are conditioned to expect their opponents

to react confounds their ability to process what hes doing.

Jeb and Walker Mismanage Time and Space

Why were Jeb and Walker hit so disproportionately hard by this? Partly because

they were in front and had the most to lose, partly because they had the largest

staffs and therefore potentially the slowestmoving campaigns, and partly due to

their personal temperaments. But also because of time and space.

In Jebs case, time: he ran his last campaign in 2002,

and the issue environment and political mood had

changed a lot since 2012, let alone a decade earlier.

Unlike Trump, he hadnt spent the past several yearsin the center of the public eye. He has repeatedly

proven slow to adapt his mental models to the

current reality, as well as slow to adapt to fluid

situations.

His disastrous confrontation with Rubioover missed votes (at the third debate)

was a textbook example of letting an opponent inside your OODA Loop. Jeb built

on a newspaper attack, which had allowed Rubio adequate time to prepare a

response. He then launched it at an inopportune timeas Jonathan Last wrote at

the time:

Bushs attack was almost certainly a premeditated set piece. Yet he didnt have the

political sense to see that Rubio was in a very good frame coming off of an answer

where he beat the snot out of the moderators. Bush had no ability to read the sceneand understand that it would have been better in that moment not to take the shot. He

had a plan, so he robotically stuck to it.

Finally, unlike Rubio, Jeb never saw coming the trap he was walking into, which

should have been obvious to anyone with basic situational awareness, when Rubio

asked the classic lawyers leading question about how Jeb had supported John
http://www.weeklystandard.com/article/jeb-s-dead-adi-s-amigo/1055011http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/in-bush-versus-rubio-the-student-schools-the-teacher/article/2575213


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McCain when he was making his late2007 comeback. That allowed Rubio to drop

the but McCain missed more votes than I did crusher that left Jeb too deflated to

respond.

Most of Jebs failures to read the scene and react faster have happened offstage

(although this is hardly the only example from the debates). His slow reaction

times contributed mightily to his failure to adjust and formulate an effective

response to the Trump barrage over the summer.

Walkers problem was one of space. Walker had been in elective office for 25

years, and had faced the voters of Wisconsin three times in the past five years,

most recently November 2014, so he was much fresher from the fight than Jeb.

But the depth of his local experience turned into a liability. Boyd was fond of citing

four interlocking concepts favored by the German military:

1. Fingerspitzengefhl, which translates more or less as fingertipsfeel, a

commander s ability to hold in his mind a map of the whole battlefield, not

just its fixed terrain but its fluid, shifting movement of forces;

2. Auftragstaktik, the ability to give orders at a fairly high level of generality and

have them carried out faithfully by subordinates focused on the objective,

rather than direction by micromanagement;3. Einheit, an animating unity of purpose that keeps the whole organization

focused not only on a single goal but on a common way of doing things (the

more einheit an organization has, the more it can trust in management by

auftragstaktik); and

4. Schwerpunkt, or the point of decisionthe crucial concept of focusing on the

opponents point of maximum vulnerability (or in some cases, the maximum

point of resistance that needs to be defeated) and concentrating as much of

ones forces and efforts on that particular target as possible at once.

Walkers long and remarkable success in Wisconsin, including victories in

Democraticleaning Milwaukee County and statewide wins in a Democratic

leaning state, derived in large part from his mastery offingerspitzengefhl.

Walkers natural voter base in Wisconsin was economically or educationally
http://jasonlefkowitz.net/2013/03/how-winners-win-john-boyd-and-the-four-qualities-of-victorious-organizations/


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Walker almost

literally knows the

political geography

of the Milwaukee

and Wisconsin

general electorates

like the back of hishand.

Trump swiftly

cannibalized

Walkers targeted

downscale white voters, like bluecollar workers and voters with no college

degrees, who saw him as one of their own, an aggressively normal beerand

brats Harley rider, Midwestern to his core, who never finished college after

leaving to take a job, married a widow 12 years his senior, and was fond of using

his Instagram feed to display his brownbag hamandcheese lunches.

Walker almost literally knows the political geography

of the Milwaukee and Wisconsin general electorates

like the back of his hand (but not so much Republican

primary electorates, having dropped out early from

the 2006 gubernatorial primaryand backed his

opponent, clearing the field for his own mostly

uncontested 2010 nomination). He has long been hisown chief strategist, notorious for a nearobsessive

attention to the details of his message and strategy.

Hes the guy who knows the terrain better than the experts.

Given this background, Walker did not hire a national strategistfor his otherwise

heavily staffed campaign, preferring to retain personal control over strategy. In a

vastly larger campaign than his usual statewide operations, that raised concerns

early on about micromanagement, which of course could slow down the speed of

the rest of his campaign, the opposite of an organization run on principles of

auftragstaktik.

It was worse than that: the very local mastery at the center of Walkers mental

models is impossible at the scale of a national campaign, like Eisenhower trying to

oversee the whole European theater on horseback. Even before Trumps entry in

the race, Walker had stumbled several times by reversing course on issues and

aspects of his message as he struggled to figure out what would resonate with the

national and earlystate electorates.

Time also became a factor. Walker had counted on

having time in the summer and early fall to work out

the kinks of his message, get his rookie mistakes out
http://dailycaller.com/2015/03/25/scott-walker-has-a-micromanagement-problem/http://www.nationalreview.com/article/415889/scott-walker-his-own-best-political-operative-and-thats-problem-eliana-johnsonhttp://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/09/us/politics/a-political-lifer-scott-walker-has-long-been-his-own-strategist.html?_r=0http://www.politico.com/story/2015/03/the-crushing-defeat-that-shaped-scott-walker-116490


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voter base, even

though he was a

candidate far

removed from one

of us.

of the way, and prepare for the progressively more

serious stages of the campaign to follow.

Instead, Trump swiftly cannibalized Walkers

targeted voter base, even though he was a candidate

far removed from one of us: a New York City

billionaire who was born to wealth, loves to brag about his Wharton School

degree, and is on his third wife, a Yugoslavianborn fashion model. Yet Trumps

unP.C. way of talking resonated far more with the shifts in national Republican

voter sentiment than Walkers lowkey, niceguy Wisconsin general election

persona.

The Washington Post, writing at the end of August, described a combatant whose

opponent was well inside his OODA Loop:

Walkers backers see a campaign discombobulated by Trumps booming popularity

and by his provocative language on immigration, China and other issues. They see in

Walker a candidate who in contrast to the discipline he showed in state races

continues to commit unforced errors, either out of lack of preparation or in an attempt

to grab for part of the flamboyant businessmans following.

When Walker ran short on resources, he did what his 2006 experience and its

aftermath had conditioned him to do: cut his losses and drop out long before the

voting.

Trump Photobombs the Republican Field

With Walker and Perry sunk at sea and Jeb driven on the shoals, the remainingfield mostly divided into three groups: candidates nimble enough to keep up with

how Trump was shifting the landscape, and reorient themselves accordingly (such

as Cruz and Rubio); candidates who were never really competing for voters who

might listen to Trump (mainly Kasich), and candidates far enough removed from

the central theaters of operations that they could stick safely to their original

plans or make adjustments that had no effect on the race anyway.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/what-happened-to-scott-walker/2015/08/30/95a870c6-4d06-11e5-84df-923b3ef1a64b_story.html


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Jindal sometimes

ruefully joked that

he should drop

Trumps name at

random intervals in

his speeches just to

get media coverage.

Paul seemed on the

verge of dropping

out until he

reoriented hiscampaign away

from pursuing

victory towards

giving voice to the

principled remnant

of his movement.

But some were also adversely affected by Trumps

alteration of reality around them. For example, Bobby

Jindala major victim of how Trump sucked the free

media oxygen from the field, drove the debate away

from nonimmigration domestic policy proposals,

and made less room for dark horse candidates on themain debate stageran short of money and dropped

out in November rather than run up a bunch of

campaign debt. Jindal sometimes ruefully joked that he should drop Trumps

name at random intervals in his speeches just to get media coverage.

Rand Paul had hoped to inherit his fathers oddly constructed coalition (consisting

of principled libertarians, national security doves, and racist, neoConfederate, orconspiracyminded cranks) and expand it by being more moderate, more

charismatic, and less odd than his father.

That strategy had already been unraveling for some months before Trumps

arrival, but the third and least savory segment of the old Ron Paul movement

seems to have decamped more or less en masseto Trump, as it turned out that

they were never really in it for the libertarian principles but for the newsletter

crackpottery that always embarrassed Pauls more thoughtful supporters and

sympathizers.

Paul seemed on the verge of dropping out until he

reoriented his campaign away from pursuing victory

towards giving voice to the principled remnant of his

movement, the segment that was always least

attracted to Trump. It remains to be seen how long

Paul will stay in the race, having unsubtly threatened

to quit if he didnt make the main stage for the

December 15 debate in Las Vegas.

Chris Christie, already known for being blunt and

loud, has gotten progressively blunter and louder,
http://www.bostonglobe.com/news/politics/2015/12/12/paul-hints-possible-end-campaign/7x5NZkzHnmRfMxwNL0AVbL/story.html


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An opponent who is

deceived by

ambiguity must

simply be made to

await the

consequences of

reality intruding on

him.

and is now picking up enough in the New Hampshire polls that he is headed

towards an inevitable collision with Trump.

The Closed Loop: The Doctor Is Not Listening

Before you can use speed to disorient your opponent and induce panic decisions,

the opponent must first notice what you are doing. An opponent who is deceived

by ambiguity or simply oblivious to his surroundings must simply be made to

await the consequences of reality intruding on him.

Ironically, the 2016 contender whose rise concurrent

with Trump in the early fall was not affected at all by

Trump was Ben Carson. One reason for this is that

Carson himself was not only running a highlyunconventional campaign, to all appearances he

operates in such a closed informational loop that he

simply doesnt process news from outside his favored

sources at all. Trump could change the reality on the

ground all he wanted, but Carson was going to keep

doing his own thing because doing his own thing is what he does.

In time, this has caught up to him. Carson has faded in the polls as voters see his

missteps and unpreparedness on major issues, mostly independently of Trump.

But Carsons fall holds lessons for Trump as well, as we shall see. A candidate who

ignores any information that doesnt fit his implicit orientation can avoid

distraction, but will sooner or later find to his peril that he is relying on feedback

that has lost touch with the reality he is trying to affect.

2008: The Last Bombing Run

Weve discussed thus far the basics of the OODA Loop and how Trump has

exploited it. But before we get to where the Loop may begin to bend against him

(or some of his adversaries), we need to consider the concept of a subsidiary or

dependent loop. That is, a theater of operations that a combatant swoops in and

dominates, only to later discover to his grief that he has drawn his attention away


23/46



We have another

recent example of a

national campaign

that grasped theoutlines of the

OODA Loop but still

got disoriented and

lost the main

battlefield.

from the main battlefield.

One example of this was the 2012 Iowa Straw Poll, in

which Michele Bachmann successfully drew Tim

Pawlenty into a contest of strength that drained

Pawlentys funds and forced him out of the race when

he lost to his fellow Minnesotan. But it turned out

that Bachmann hadnt actually won anything. She was

shortly eclipsed by Herman Cain in the polls, and

ended up finishing dead last in the Iowa Caucus.

We have another recent example of a national

campaign that grasped the outlines of the OODA Loop but still got disoriented and

lost the main battlefield: the last general election campaign by a combat pilot, John

McCain in 2008.

McCain, nine years younger than Boyd and a carrierbased Navy bomber pilot in

Vietnam, started his race against Barack Obama in a polling and organizational

hole, but with the advantage that he was able to lock up his partys nomination a

lot earlier than Obama. McCain had survived that far by making his team leaner,

jettisoning most of his old campaign advisers before staging a big primarycomeback. That fit with the maverick senators preferred approach and

temperamentas the old line goes, its no accident that McCain in the Navy

always flew a oneseater airplane.

McCain had a few builtin advantages over Obama: he was not just vastly more

experienced on the national political stage, a fixture on the Sunday shows with a

prior presidential run under his belt, but (unlike Obamas primary foe, HillaryClinton), McCain had long, friendly relations with much of the national press

corps. Despite his more advanced age, McCain was faster, nimbler on his feet, and

much quicker to change course than Obama.

Fighting Inside the 24-Hour News Cycle

1992 was the first election after the Gulf War had launched cable news to national


24/46



Where 1980s

campaigns had

aimed for the good

photo-op and

soundbite for the

evening news,

1990s-2000scampaigns aimed to

control the round-

the-clock news

cycle.

prominence and the end of the Fairness Doctrine unleashed national talk radio;

2004 was the first with blogs but the last before the real spread of Twitter,

Facebook, and YouTube. A central battlefield of national campaigns in the years

from 1992 to 2004 was the news cyclethe collection of stories that would

dominate a few days coverage and talk.

Where 1980s campaigns had aimed for the good

photoop and soundbite for the evening news, 1990s

2000s campaigns aimed to control the roundthe

clock news cycle. If you control the news cycle, you

set the ground of what the campaigns are talking

about. Winning campaigns like the Clinton War

Room of 1992 mastered this; losing ones like Al Gorein 2000 were constantly reactive to the news cycle,

and pushed offmessage.

Its easily forgotten now given how the campaign

ended, but once battle was joined, McCain and his

campaign manager Steve Schmidt tactically outfoxed Obama for much of summer

2008, winning news cycle after news cycle with attacks and ads needling Obamas

foreign trip, his celebrity status, and his selfimportance. McCain was moving

faster than Obama, and getting inside his head by pricking his vanity.

Then, he staged the tacticallybrilliant coup of picking Sarah Palin as his running

mate. How tactically brilliant? Operational security was airtight. The media was

totally in the dark that Palin was on her way until she arrived to be announced

that morning. The Democrats were flabbergastedtheyd posted a website with

advance opposition research on McCains potential running mates (including

people like Eric Cantor, Charlie Crist, and FedEx CEO Fred Smith) but it didnt

include a word on Palin. Palin completely dominated the news cycle for a solid

week after the GOP convention, and national polls showed McCain pulling even

with Obama.

But even before the tactical audacity of the Palin pick started to get undermined


25/46



While McCain was

needling Obama,

Obamas digital

organizing team

was focused on themore critically

important

battlefield.

by Palins own issues, McCain and Schmidt had totally lost sight of the larger

picture McCain needed to win the election. McCains newscycle victories were

flawed in two ways.

But Social Media Had Overtaken the News Cycle

First, he was reinforcing things voters already priced into Obama (that he was

inexperienced, overpromising, and full of himself) instead of defining Obama as

having valuesout of step with the electorate. Second, while McCain was needling

Obama, Obamas digital organizing team was focused on the more critically

important battlefield of identifying potential supporters and building direct

communications with them, using the onetoone targeting capabilities of social

media to bypass the mass media news cycle in ways impossible as recently as

2004.

Thus, McCain was able to outfox Obamas rapid

response to news in a way that unsettled Obama and

his communications team, but he wasnt able to

throw off the Obama campaigns overarching

strategy. McCain had flown his bomber into a

subsidiary loop.

This made him vulnerable to being swamped by a

new, external event: the September 2008 credit

crisis. When it hit, he reacted again with speed and surprise, announcing a brief

suspension of his campaign to fly back to DC to help handle the crisis. But

McCains capacity to surprise no longer mattered. Obama and his team had,

correctly, interpreted the crisis as a help to them and any solution as unpopular.They let McCain fly off into the sun.

Collapsing Trumps Loop

If Trump has been so effective at strategy thus far in the campaign, does that mean

he would be a successful general election candidate and a good commanderin

chief? No, it doesnt, and in fact, there are significant warning signs that Trump


26/46



They operatedinside the enemys

Loop, but without

tending to their

own, which

remained mostly

closed.

There are

significant warning

signs that Trump

may already befalling into some of

the very traps Boyd

warned against.

may already be falling into some of the very traps Boyd warned against.

In some ways, Trumps situation in the summer and

fall of 2015 is similar to that of Imperial Japan in late

1941 and early 1942. The Japanese ran wild for six

months after Pearl Harbor, using speed, strategic and

tactical surprise, and sudden, overwhelming force to

disorient their opponents and change their

surrounding reality faster than they could react.

They also compelled their adversariesin the short runto fight the kind of war

the Japanese had spent the previous 36 years planning for. The result took the

weakest combatant (the Dutch) completely out of the fight, drove most distant and

thus slowest to replenish its forces (the British Navy) out of the theater, and sent

the locals underground (the Filipinos) or deeper into their interior (the Chinese).

But the Japanese didnt apply Boyds OODA cycle as an open loop from which they

could learn and adapt. They just came in with a castinstone preexisting skillset

that was spectacularly wellsuited to their initial offensive. They operated inside

the enemys Loop, but without tending to their own, which remained mostly

closed.

What Japan was not prepared for, or able to handle when it inevitably developed,

was the expansion of the battlefield that was necessary to actually win the war.

From mid1942 on, the Americans launched 16 new warships for every one Japan

produced the rest of the war.

Japan had expanded to its maximum limits. It could

not win another inch of territory, and bled its navy

white at Midway and its army dry in Burma, having

exhausted the lowhanging fruit while the enemys

available ground troops were multiplying. A war

spanning the whole of the Pacific, China, Southeast

Asia, and all the islands in between was far beyond

Japans manpower capacity, and Japanese high


27/46



While hes very

shrewd and swift in

observing,orienting, deciding,

and acting when

hes on familiar

terrain, Trump

draws information

from a fairly closed

command was slow to learn and adapt to a new and different war than the one

they had started.

Trump has been winning by forcing the other contenders to the battlefields on

which he has been training the past 35 years: massmarket free publicity, pro

wrestlingstyle smashmouth reality TV, and collectiveaction negotiations of the

type Trump knows well from multiple realestate bankruptcies.

But, like Imperial Japan, this does not mean hes an evolving combatant who can

handle opponents shifting the battlefield and upsetting hisability to process

reality. It just means that he has seized the initiative and planted his flag on all the

territory his initial surge could reach by using the same approach hes been

honing for decades. He is just as much a creature of his own experiencebased

mental models as Jeb or Walker. The only difference is that his entry in the race

was so unplanned that his opponents had to watch him in action before they could

plot a counterstrategy.

The Gold-Plated Closed Loop

Winston Churchill once described the essential attributes of a great commanderas

having massive common sense and reasoning power, not only imagination, but

also an element of legerdemain, an original and sinister touch, which leaves the

enemy puzzled as well as beaten. Trump may have the legerdemain, but he sorely

lacks the rest.

The signs we have seen so far of Trump suggest that,

while hes very shrewd and swift in observing,

orienting, deciding, and acting when hes onfamiliar

terrain, he draws information from a fairly closed

loop, and is not wellsuited to expanding to a broader,

less familiar battlefield. Therein lies his vulnerability

in a primary or general election, as well as his

deficiency as a potential commanderinchief despite

his natural grasp of the basic precepts of strategy,

tactics, leverage, speed, and ambiguity.
https://books.google.com/books?id=6l6Fgnz8fXIC&pg=PA293&lpg=PA293&dq=massive+common+sense+and+reasoning+power,+not+only+imagination,+but+also+an+element&source=bl&ots=ht2w4uATa_&sig=11W4wcM2iezrH3AD-QJPebqI4dY&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwit8LzSzt7JAhXKHT4KHTAAA9MQ6AEIHDAA#v=onepage&q=massive%20common%20sense%20and%20reasoning%20power%2C%20not%20only%20imagination%2C%20but%20also%20an%20element&f=false


28/46



loop.

Trump has

repeatedly made

statements that he

and his team had

clearly made no

effort to verify inadvance, drawn

from sources whose

credibility should

have been huge red

flags.

The way Trump has dealt with facts in his public

statements is a tipoff. Political speech routinely incorporates assertions of fact

that range from debatable to unverifiable to provably false, and sometimes this is

a sign of shrewd cynicism rather than selfdeception.

But Trump has repeatedly made statements that he and his team had clearly made

no effort to verify in advance, drawn from sources whose credibility should have

been huge red flags, even though they were outside the common cultural and

media conventional wisdom and therefore likely to be challenged.

In political debate, that represents a vulnerability waiting to be exploited; in

international affairs, where presidents must routinely cut through misinformation

and direct their staffs to do the same, it can be fatal.

The recent dustup over Trumps claimwhich was,

at best, severely exaggeratedthat he had seen video

of thousands of Muslims celebrating 9/11 in Jersey

City is a classic example of this. So is the fact that

Trump cites Infowars reporting in campaign

speeches based solely on having clicked a link on the

Drudge Report, and has gone on Alex Jones

conspiracytheorysoaked show to trade praise with

Jones.

Trumps willingness to pitch public battles on the turf

of things he reads on the Internet without even

remotely credible confirmation suggests thatdespite his savvy in evaluating

information when dealing with the U.S. national media environment and the

economic bargaining tables hes excelled atTrump is vulnerable to psyop

disinformation campaigns once he gets outside his comfort zone.

As Black Hawk Down author Mark Bowden summarized his impression of

Trumpfrom spending a weekend with him in 1996 for a Playboymagazine profile:
http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2015/12/donald-trump-mark-bowden-playboy-profilehttp://www.cnn.com/2015/12/02/politics/donald-trump-praises-9-11-truther-alex-jones/http://www.infowars.com/donald-trump-mentions-infowars-report-at-campaign-stop/http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/abc-news-footage-shows-911-celebrations/story?id=35534125


29/46



Time after time the stories he told me didnt check outApart from the comical ego,

the errors, and the selfserving bluster, what you get from Trump are commonplace

ideas pronounced as received wisdomThe ideas that pop into his head are the same

ones that occur to any teenager angry about terror attacks. They appeal to anyone

who cant be bothered to think them throughcant be bothered to ask not just the

moral questions but the allimportant practical one: Will doing this makes things

better or worse? When you believe in your own genius, you dont question your own

flashes of inspiration.

Trumps speeches and Twitter rants frequently focus on his poll standing, yet

cherrypick only those polls that are favorable, and his view of which pollsters are

reliable is laughable to anyone who has followed the polling business in recent

years.

Unlike successful campaigns of the pastin particular contrast to the massive Big

Data and proprietary polling projectthat was crucial to President Obamas 2012

reelectionTrump brags about having no polling operation of his own. He

believes what he reads in the papers, if he likes it, and discards the rest. Nate

Silver has noted how the shortterm feedback loop in which Trump has been

operating only encourages Trumps confidencethat he can keep prospering by

doing the same things without adjusting his sources of information:

[I]tspossible that the Republican reluctance to criticize Trump stems from a surfeit

of shortterm thinking combined with a possible misreading of the polls. Several

times so far in the campaign, weve witnessed the following cycle:
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-republicans-and-polls-enable-donald-trump/http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/11/16/politics-and-the-new-machinehttps://datafloq.com/read/big-data-obama-campaign/516


30/46



The battlefield will

expand, and he

1. Trump says something offensive or ludicrous.

2. Some pundits loudly proclaim that it could bring about the end of

Trumps campaign.

3. Instead, Trumps position remains steady or even improved in ballottest

polls.4. The same pundits therefore conclude that Trump is indestructible and

impervious to criticism.

[One] problem is that in a field that still has 14 candidates, more media coverage

even negative media coverage potentially helps a candidate toimprove his

position on the ballot test. In general, there has been a strong correlationbetween

how well a candidate is performing on the ballot test and how much media coverage

hes receivingTrump seems to understand this; indeed, he seems to issue his most

controversial remarks and proposals precisely at moments of perceived

vulnerability.Republicans are afraid to criticize Trump in part because it rarely

produces instant gratification in a winthemorning political culture that keeps score

based on polls. Without seeing any repercussions, Trump goes farther out on a limb

If this dynamic correctly describes the rest of the primary and general elections,

then Trump does not need to learn and adapt in order to win. But most likely, it

does not.

Making Trump Fight A Land War In Asia

The challenge Trump now faces is that the conditions of the summer and fall are

not the same conditions under which the nomination will be decided. The

battlefield will expand, and he must adjust his approach or meet the same fate as

Imperial Japan.

The most obvious reason is the size of the field. We

are down from 17 candidates to 14, and if history is

any guide, more than half of those 14 should be out of
http://www.politico.com/blogs/ben-smith/2009/04/winning-the-dawn-017268http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/donald-trump-is-running-a-perpetual-attention-machine/http://www.cjr.org/analysis/the_medias_trump_conundrum.phphttp://fivethirtyeight.com/features/donald-trump-is-the-worlds-greatest-troll/


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A candidate who

cant break out

from 25 to 30

percent cannot win

enough delegates to

clinch the

nomination.

must adjust his

approach or meet

the same fate as

Imperial Japan.

the race after South Carolina (the third state to vote).

As the number of candidates narrows, the share of

the vote needed to win grows. Iowas Republican

caucus has been won with as little as 24 to 26 percent

of the vote (by Rick Santorum in 2012 and Bob Dole in 1996) and only once since

1980 has a candidate won 40 percent (George W. Bush winning 41 percent in

2000). New Hampshire has been won with as little as 27 percent (Pat Buchanan in

1996). McCain won 47.2 percent of the popular vote across all primaries in 2008;

that was the lowestwinning share of the GOP primary vote since 1976.

A candidate who cant break out from 25 to 30 percent cannot win enough

delegates to clinch the nomination. Thats what happened to factional candidates

who limited their appeal to the grievances and resentments of a

disproportionately downscale voter base, like Buchanan (20.8 percent of the vote

in 1996) or Jesse Jackson (29.4 percent in 1988).

While Trumps hold on that 25 to 30 percent of the

vote has been surprisingly consistent, national and

earlystate primary polls since Labor Day have shown

no growth in his support. Meanwhile, an increasingnumber of potential GOP primary voters view Trump

unfavorably. That suggests potential limits on his

ability to scale his current voter base upwards as past

frontrunnersturnednominee have doneunless he

can adjust his message to the needs of a changed battlefield dominated by voters

not already on the Trump Train.

Instead, he seems determined to bask in the glow of the people already backing

him, feeding them increasing quantities of what has already bound them to his

candidacy. This is where the risk of a closed loop comes in, if Trump disdains polls

and research of his own. If Trump keeps being gratified by crowd sizes, poll

standing, and tweets showing him with a solid quarter of the public on his side, he

will simply keep building a bigger wall between the voters he has and the voters


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People responding

to polls months

before the election

are not the same

universe as the

people who actually

show up to vote in

primaries.

he needs.

Bigger Voter Pools Dilute Trumps Support

The second way the battlefield is changing is who the voters are. People

responding to polls months before the election are not the same universe as the

people who actually show up to vote in primaries, and even less so in caucuses. In

November 2012, 129 million people voted (61 million for Mitt Romney), but only

18 million voted in the 2012 GOP primaries, about 12.5 percent of all registered

voters and less than a third of all GOP general election voters.

Iowa had 2.1 million registered voters in January

2012; 121,501 of them voted in the Republican

caucus, around 5.7 percent. New Hampshire hadabout 767,000 registered voters in 2012; even with a

primary open to Independents and no Democratic

primary, 248,475 voted in 2012 GOP primary, about

32 percent.

Primary campaigns are hugely dependent on their

ability to mobilize their voters to actually show up at the polls, and most every

effort that has been made to narrow the polling universe to people likely to vote

(by traditional metrics) has cut deeply into Trumps poll support. That doesnt

mean he cant turn out his voters, but it means he needs to open his OODA Loop to

observe and orient himself towards the propensity of his poll supporters to vote,

and make decisions and take action to make it happen.

The third way the primary battlefield shifts once the voting starts: the voters take

it more seriously. They pay more attention, and many decide late. There are reams

of polling and politicalscience evidence showing that voters tune in much more as

an election gets closer, especially a primary election. A candidate like Trump, who

has coasted on high name recognition, can see the electoral mood shift suddenly

as voters take a closer look at him and at the alternatives.

Fourth, one of Trumps major assets may degrade as he gets deeper into the
https://sos.iowa.gov/elections/pdf/VRStatsArchive/2012/CoJan12.pdf


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A truly

sophisticated

approach might also

consider exploiting

Trumps

vulnerability tomisinformation.

A candidate like

Trump, who has

coasted on high

name recognition,

can see the

electoral mood shift

suddenly as voters

take a closer look at

him and at the

alternatives.

primaries: his ambiguity about running third party.

The more primaries he files in, the more states will

follow Ohio in forcing him off the November ballot

unless he files and wins a lawsuit challenging sore

loser laws.

Also, the more he loses, the more the potential appeal

of a Trump thirdparty run dims as he loses the

winner sheen. Between April 26 and the July 21 end

of the GOP convention, 13 states have deadlines for

filing for the ballot, including Texas, Florida, Georgia,

North Carolina, Illinois, Michigan, Nevada, and Indiana.

The changing battlefield is not the only way his opponents could degrade Trumps

OODA Loop as the calendar turns. A truly sophisticated approach might also

consider exploiting Trumps vulnerability to misinformation. I remember once

watching a mid80s Monday Night Baseball broadcast where Howard Cosell, a

great boxing and football announcer who knew nearly nothing about baseball,

announced that Keith Hernandez had begged him before the game not to reveal

that Hernandez lifetime batting average was .152.

Its possible that the original statistic given Cosell was

not quite as ridiculous as that and he mangled it on

air, but it seemed pretty obvious that Hernandez had

pranked Cosell with bad information, knowing he

could take advantage of Cosells inability to

distinguish good information about baseball statistics

from bad. A candidate who will quote Infowars

stories in campaign speeches and retweet random

white supremacistsand madeup statisticsis exceptionally vulnerable to being fed

misinformation that will blow up in his face like a cartoon exploding cigar.

The two candidates best positioned to surge past Trump in the spring of 2016 are

a pair of much younger men noted for their quickness of mind and gifts as
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3329934/Donald-Trump-branded-racist-retweeting-statistics-murders-committed-black-people.htmlhttp://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/donald-trump-dutch-white-supremacisthttp://www.centerforpolitics.org/crystalball/articles/threes-company/http://www.cleveland.com/open/index.ssf/2015/12/donald_trump_cant_run_as_indep.html


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extemporaneous speakers: Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio. Each has showcased a

distinct approach to expanding the battlefield and shifting the ground on their

opponents.

The Ground War: Ted Cruz and the Grassroots

Cruzs strategy to get past Trump and his other opponents seems to rely on four

prongs: (1) altering the opponents reality by using grassroots turnout to change

the electorate; (2) exploiting the sequential nature of the primary calendar to

create momentum; (3) leveraging to Cruzs advantage how Trump has reshaped

the debate; and (4) using ambiguity to leverage Trumps own ambiguity against

Cruzs unambiguously loyal Republican opponents.

First, its notable that Cruz and his oddly disorganized coterie of SuperPACs havespent almost as little money on TV ads as Trump, yet this has not stopped him

from pulling into first place in Iowa, second in national polls, and fourth in New

Hampshire. Why?

Partly due to his strong builtin brand identity as the Senates Mr. Conservative

and bte noir of DC Republicans, but also in part because he has invested his

strong fundraising haulheavily into the kinds of grassroots organizing and digital

voter targeting that was the hallmark of the Obama campaigns ability to expand

the Left end of the electorate. As a recent Washington Post profile described the

thinking behind the Cruz microtargeting and voterprofiling operation:

Cruzs campaign manager, Jeff Roeexplained the campaigns heavy investment in

data and analysis. Its critical because of changes in the nature of the electorate,

popular media, polling and campaign finance law, which make many of the old axiomsof campaigning gathering endorsements, purchasing highcost broadcast ads

less valuableThere is no handbook for this, the Missouribased political consultant

said of running a presidential campaign in 2016. The conventional wisdom has been

destroyed. What you can do is rely on data.

Cruzs psychographicsbased operation has its critics, but if it works, just as
https://twitter.com/PatrickRuffini/status/618973050160156672http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/features/2015-11-12/is-the-republican-party-s-killer-data-app-for-real-https://ww

Documents

Military Strategist Explains Why Trump Leads—and Will Fail