Monday, February 8, 2016

As with so many other aspects of the presidential campaign, Trump has taken decades of received wisdom about American politics and turned it on its head.



Donald Trump has been blowing up the traditional GOP certainties left and right, and this week he overturned another one. In what seemed like an embarrassing rebuke, on February 1, Adele told the Republican front-runner that he didn’t have her permission to use her songs at his massive campaign events. Adele might just be the world’s most popular singer at the moment, and any normal candidate would have folded his tent, chastened. Not Trump. At his rally in Little Rock, Arkansas, two days later, the crowd of thousands listened to Adele’s “Skyfall” before Trump’s helicopter landed. A day after that, in Exeter, New Hampshire, Adele’s “Rolling In the Deep” could be heard blaring behind the candidate when he made his entrance.

The move was classic Donald Trump, shameless and defiant. And this bold handling of a music controversy, and Trump’s creative use of music on the trail in general, marks a complete departure from typical Republican Party practice. Trump is a novel GOP candidate in many ways, but in finally making music work for him, he’s managed to master a problem that has bedeviled the party’s campaigns—from Ronald Reagan 1984 to Michele Bachmann 2012—for decades....
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