Trump Is Stuck In A Reality TV Narrative

  Donald Trump is still insisting that CNN needs to pay him $5 Million to participate in the upcoming Republican Presidential Debate, on Dec. 15th (or make a $10M donation to charity). Breitbart News reports that the self-made promoter is increasing the rhetoric of his importance to the CNN TV event.
  Trump's art of hardball negotiating television deals for his reality tv appearances appears to be upstaging his own effort to advocate for national government reform.
  Could this backfire on Trump's image as a statesman for political reform? More than a few have observed that Trump appears to be defying certain 'laws' of politics. This could be just another  instance of political rules not applying to Trump. And yet, many political handlers dismiss this $5 million dollar trick as just a pre-debate trick to continue his hype-based campaign and underscore his celebrity narcissism.

  A decade ago, Trump was "very liberal, and increasingly more so". He now emerges as a self-proclaimed conservative; yet he cannot point to an issue or series of events which he can identify as leading to his core change in worldview.

“I won’t do the debate unless they pay me five million dollars,” - Trump

  He says he's a "deeply religious Christian", but he told Frank Luntz in an interview last Summer that he "has never asked God for forgiveness".  For that reason and others, the Presidential Family Forum did not include Trump. Evangelical groups have largely dismissed him as unreliable to further their public policy concerns. Trump demanded that The leadership of the Presidential Family Forum first publicly endorsed his candidacy as a requirement for his participation in the roundtable discussion.

  The Family Leader is an evangelical association which has greatly influenced the Iowa Caucuses in the last two national election cycles, propelling both Huckabee and Santorum to wins in the Iowa Republican Caucus after mere obscurity just 2 months prior to the contest.  Many are expecting Sen. Ted Cruz to be the endorsed candidate in the 2016 contest.