There are two starkly different candidates running for the American presidency in 2016. One has built a campaign on political racism and bullying, blending protectionist policies with deportation plans and Muslim bans in the hope of wooing white workers. His off-the-cuff, stream-of-consciousness speeches careen from threats of violence to promises of national greatness.
The other is pursuing an agenda of outreach and responsibility: detailed policy speeches read from teleprompters, visits to foreign leaders and to struggling communities, calls for national unity.
![Illustration: Andrew Dyson.](/web/20160922035003im_/http://www.theage.com.au/content/dam/images/g/r/j/n/b/4/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.grjfbx.png/1474332489253.jpg)
The problem is that both candidates are Donald Trump.
Think of them as New Trump and Trump Classic. Both have been hitting the campaign trail since Trump shook up his staff after the Republican convention. Since then he has been running two separate campaigns, in the hopes of holding on to his longtime supporters while reaching out to white voters anxious about his divisive candidacy. And at the moment, it appears to be working.
![Donald Trump will lie directly to your face then laugh at you for believing him.](/web/20160922035003im_/http://www.theage.com.au/content/dam/images/g/r/f/q/5/s/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.grjfbx.png/1474295639766.jpg)
When Trump undertook his latest campaign revamp, he hired two new people: Kellyanne Conway and Stephen Bannon. Conway has emerged as the campaign manager for New Trump. Polls in hand, she counsels him on countering every criticism. Accused of being racist? Visit a black church. Called unpresidential? Fly to Mexico and stand next to a world leader. Seen as undisciplined? Stick to scripted speeches.
The New Trump, though he visits African-American communities and says nice – well, nicer – things about Mexican-Americans, is not being peddled to minority voters. When he goes to places like Flint, Michigan, he is there to talk about African-Americans, not to them. In an August speech given in a white suburb of Lansing, Michigan, Trump addressed an almost all-white audience, where he spoke about African-American voters as if they lived exclusively in urban slums. "You're living in poverty," he said of African-Americans, "your schools are no good, you have no jobs."
The speech was less about attracting the vote of African-Americans – whose support for Trump has long hovered in the low-single digits – and more about Trump signalling to white voters that he isn't really racist. And that in a nutshell is Conway's job: to convince white suburban voters alienated by Trump that he's not so bad.
Were that the only Trump in the running, we would all now be talking about the much-anticipated pivot. But Trump Classic is still in the hunt. This Trump, the one encouraged by right-wing media entrepreneur Steve Bannon, is the one that won the nomination. It's the Trump who encourages "Second Amendment people" to overturn a Hillary Clinton victory, who calls women he disagrees with "neurotic" and "crazy", who attacks veterans and families of fallen soldiers and people with disabilities.
Trump Classic isn't given the free rein he once was allowed, but he pops up now and again in early morning Twitter screeds and unscripted asides in his speeches. At a rally last week he suggested Clinton's protective team should be disarmed. "Take their guns away, let's see what happens to her." It was a dangerous statement built on a broader lie, that Clinton plans to abolish the Second Amendment.
No normal politician could pull off this sort of bizarre campaigning. The charges of flip-flopping and lying would damage rather than bolster a traditional candidate. But for Trump, the lying and evasion is part of the appeal. He cares so little about the norms of politics – or the norms of human relations – that he'll lie directly to your face then laugh at you for believing him. For Trump supporters, such open hostility to the truth becomes "telling it like it is," a fetish for authenticity that has nothing to do with honesty and everything to do with revolting against politics-as-usual.
At least, that's why supporters of Trump Classic put up with his double-sided campaign. For those who prefer New Trump, the appeal is more subtle. These voters are part of the more than 70 per cent who find Clinton untrustworthy. Driven away by Trump Classic, they are hungry for a reason to vote for him with a clear conscience. Enter New Trump. He allows them to point to his retreat from conspiracies about Barack Obama's birthplace as evidence that he isn't racist, or to his canned policy speeches as evidence that he can be presidential.
By running his dual campaigns, Trump has become a choose-your-own-adventure candidate: pick the policies and rhetoric you like and pretend that that pastiche is an accurate portrayal of how Trump would govern. It requires a lot of wishful thinking and wilful ignorance. Minority voters are unwilling to do that. There's too much directly at stake for them to believe Trump is just kidding when he talks about deportation or promotes white supremacists. But white voters may still play along with the con. If they do, Trump's two-Trump strategy could still carry the day in November.
Nicole Hemmer is a Fairfax columnist and a research affiliate at the US Studies Centre at the University of Sydney.
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