05-06-2011, 10:52 PM
Howard Kurtz – Fri May 6, 4:53 am ET
NEW YORK – By taunting the tycoon with jokes and taking out Osama, the president muscled Donald Trump out of the news. Howard Kurtz on why the master showman will find it hard to repair his image.
The Donald Trump steamroller got run off the road last week, and getting back on track may not be easy.
The wealthy developer surged to the top of the Republican polls with a bombastic media blitz that stunned the political pros, even as many scoffed at the notion that he is seriously running for president. Now he's been roughed up, ridiculed, and, for the moment, knocked out of the news.
Trump, like every other potential GOP candidate, has been utterly overshadowed by the administration’s triumph in killing Osama bin Laden (forcing NBC, irony of ironies, to cut away from Celebrity Apprentice on Sunday night). But the impact may have been greater for The Donald because it made the issue he was loudly pursuing—Barack Obama’s birth certificate—seem so small.
Trump may have been “very proud of myself,” as he put it, when the president released his long-form birth certificate. But Obama’s move put the allegation that Trump had been peddling to rest, at least among reasonable people. And when Obama said he had “other things to do,” we didn’t know that meant planning a daring helicopter raid to kill the world’s most-wanted terrorist.
Little wonder, then, that Obama leads Trump, 53 to 25 percent, in a Newsweek/Daily Beast poll conducted two days before and two days after the bin Laden mission. (In a CNN survey released Thursday, Trump finished an eyelash behind Mike Huckabee as the top presidential choice of Republicans, but a breathtaking 64 percent of those surveyed had a negative view of him.)
The long form please ~!~
NEW YORK – By taunting the tycoon with jokes and taking out Osama, the president muscled Donald Trump out of the news. Howard Kurtz on why the master showman will find it hard to repair his image.
The Donald Trump steamroller got run off the road last week, and getting back on track may not be easy.
The wealthy developer surged to the top of the Republican polls with a bombastic media blitz that stunned the political pros, even as many scoffed at the notion that he is seriously running for president. Now he's been roughed up, ridiculed, and, for the moment, knocked out of the news.
Trump, like every other potential GOP candidate, has been utterly overshadowed by the administration’s triumph in killing Osama bin Laden (forcing NBC, irony of ironies, to cut away from Celebrity Apprentice on Sunday night). But the impact may have been greater for The Donald because it made the issue he was loudly pursuing—Barack Obama’s birth certificate—seem so small.
Trump may have been “very proud of myself,” as he put it, when the president released his long-form birth certificate. But Obama’s move put the allegation that Trump had been peddling to rest, at least among reasonable people. And when Obama said he had “other things to do,” we didn’t know that meant planning a daring helicopter raid to kill the world’s most-wanted terrorist.
Little wonder, then, that Obama leads Trump, 53 to 25 percent, in a Newsweek/Daily Beast poll conducted two days before and two days after the bin Laden mission. (In a CNN survey released Thursday, Trump finished an eyelash behind Mike Huckabee as the top presidential choice of Republicans, but a breathtaking 64 percent of those surveyed had a negative view of him.)
The long form please ~!~
