Trump-Clinton, the debates

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How the debate was spun:

Ever since the first presidential debate ended on Monday, Donald Trump and his surrogates have done everything possible to obfuscate the truth because they know he got walloped. Immediately after the debate, Trump got Fox News’ Sean Hannity to cover for his repeated lies about opposing the Iraq war. Using Hannity, Alex Jones, and Matt Drudge, the campaign widely circulated highly unscientific online polls saying that Trump won the debate. His campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, argued that his “restraint”—meaning the fact that he only alluded to Bill Clinton’s affairs without bringing them up outright—was a “presidential virtue” that would help win over women. And Trump blamed the microphone for capturing more than a few low-energy sniffles throughout the evening.

Donald Trump Is Owning Hillary Clinton on Trade | New Republic

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Bringing up Bill, a good idea? Probably not..

That’s probably wise, given that it’s a minefield for Trump. History shows that whenever Bill Clinton’s sexual behavior comes to light, as it did in the 1990s with his affairs with Flowers and Monica Lewinsky, the overwhelming reaction of the American public is to feel sympathy for Clinton. She’s seen as the victim in these stories, the wronged wife who is struggling to hold her marriage together despite her horndog husband. The narrative of Hillary Clinton as aiding and abetting in the abuse of women is beloved by the likes of Stone but has little traction with the general public. According to a Fox News poll from earlier this year 50 percent of Americans (and 55 percent of women) thought Bill Clinton was more respectful of women than Donald Trump. Only 37 percent of Americans (and 31 percent of women) thought Trump was more respectful.

Further, to bring up Clinton’s marital history would also make Trump’s own marriages fair play. His first two marriages ended in divorce, and he was bedeviled by accusations of infidelity and even, in the case of the second marriage, rape. Many of the men around him (Gingrich, Roger Ailes, Rudy Giuliani, Stephen Bannon) have sordid personal histories that would become fair game if the Clinton’s own history were brought up.

Donald Trump Is Walking Into a Minefield, and He Can’t Stop Himself | New Republic

[stpioc]

And as we argued before, Trump's stance on trade is hot air, it's simply a convenient ploy that taps into the angst and decline of the middle class whilst enable him to clobber his adversaries. 

Worse, if he actually takes it serious (rather than just use it as a campaign/debate tool), it's suggested solution (protectionism) will do much more harm than good. 

Trump did not “win” the trade portion of the debate so much as Clinton lost it. Trump’s understanding on trade is at best simplistic; at worst, it’s a total fantasy. Whenever he gets into specifics, he betrays his deep-seated ignorance of basic policy. Trump began the debate by saying, “Thank you, Lester. Our jobs are fleeing the country.” This is not true—we’ve added jobs for the last 78 months—but it set the (Millenarian) tone of the next ten minutes. During the portion on trade, Trump claimed that Ford Motor Company was rushing to get out of the country (it isn’t), that China is devaluing its currency (it’s propping it up), and that Mexico and China were thriving because of the jobs they had stolen from us (neither country is thriving).

Trump has been saying this for the last 15 months. It’s effective not because it’s true, or because it suggests a plausible plan of action, but because it speaks to the pain and anger felt in many of the former manufacturing areas of the country that have been particularly hard hit over the last 40 years. 

Donald Trump Is Owning Hillary Clinton on Trade | New Republic

There is simply no evidence to suggest that trade the sole, or even biggest responsible for the disappearance of good paying manufacturing jobs. This is simply mostly down to automation, we're able to run many plants with a fraction of the manpower compared to a few decades ago. 

Just as the disappearance of agricultural jobs (which a century ago employed half the working population) is mostly due to mechanization, the same holds for manufacturing.

[Admin]

After a poor first debate, Trump and surrogates like Gingrich, Guliani, Bannon and Ailes think it's a good idea to go after Hillary for her husband's transgressions.

Probably not a good idea.

For various reasons, only one of them it their own checkered history with women.. Here is Trump's:

Trump’s first wife, Ivana, filed for divorce after news surfaced that he was having an affair with Marla Maples. In court documents she accused Trump of “cruel and inhuman treatment.” Discussing the affair with Vanity Fair, Trump said, “When a man leaves a woman, especially when it was perceived that he has left for a piece of ass—a good one!—there are 50 percent of the population who will love the woman who was left.”

Trump later married Maples, then they divorced four years later. He married his current wife, Melania, in 2005.
Temple Taggart, a contestant in the Miss USA pageant that Trump owned, said he introduced himself to her by kissing her “directly on the lips,” adding, “I think there were a few other girls that he kissed on the mouth. I was like ‘Wow, that’s inappropriate.’”

Jill Harth worked with Trump on a beauty pageant in the 1990s and later accused him of engaging in inappropriate sexual behavior in the course of doing business with her. She said when she first met Trump, he asked her boyfriend, “‘Are you sleeping with her?’ Meaning me. And George looked a little shocked and he said, ‘Well, yeah.’ And he goes, ‘Well, for the weekend or what?’”

In a deposition, Harth said Trump groped her under a table, and she said, “This was a very traumatic thing working for him.”
Executives at the Trump Organization told The New York Times that Trump “occasionally interrupted routine discussions of business to opine on women’s figures.” According to Barbara Res, who worked as Trump’s head of construction, he once told her out of the blue that women in Marina del Rey “take care of their asses.”

Recently asked by USA Today columnist Kirsten Powers how he would feel if his daughter were subjected to sexual harassment at her place of business, he said, “I would like to think she would find another career or find another company if that was the case.”

The Men Behind Trump’s Attacks On Clinton Marriage Have A History Of Sexual Harassment, Spousal Abuse, And Marital Infidelity

If you must, the article shows also the history of the likes of Giuliani, Gingrich, Bannon and Ailes, some of which are considerably more sordid than those of Trump himself.

[Admin]

Donald Trump can be forgiven for being caught off-guard in the moment. His presidency-disqualifying sin came in the hours after the debate. The Clinton campaign released a slickly produced video featuring Machado. The Guardian and Cosmopolitan rushed pre-planned Machado profiles to publication. Hillary Clinton did everything but spraypaint “THIS IS A TRAP” on the side of Trump Tower. And still Trump fell for it. And fell for it. And fell for it. Six days later, he’s still falling for it.

There was nothing ingenious about Clinton’s scheme. If anything, it was a bit like her satisfied delivery of “Trumped-up trickle-down economics” — too clever by half, too obviously planned by whole. All Trump had to do was nothing. Or to say: “Hillary Clinton wants to talk about beauty pageants rather than her 30 year record of corruption and failure.”

In the context of a presidential campaign, all this is amusing. It will make a wonderful chapter in the next edition of Game Change. But imagine that this wasn’t a presidential campaign. Imagine it was the Trump presidency. And imagine it wasn’t Hillary Clinton trying to bait Trump into attacking Alicia Machado, but ISIS trying to bait Trump into attacking Iraq, or Vladimir Putin trying to bait Trump into breaking with NATO, or Angela Merkel trying to bait Trump into isolating the United States before a key vote at the United Nations, or China trying to bait Trump into giving them an excuse to assert their claim over Taiwan.

But that’s why the Machado affair has been so enlightening. In this case, Hillary Clinton’s campaign explained that they were setting a trap. The media explained that Clinton’s campaign was setting a trap. And all of Trump’s staff and advisors undoubtedly explained that Trump’s enemies were setting a trap.

Trump didn’t listen, or perhaps he didn’t care. He sprung the trap anyway. He is more passionate about proving his dominance and humiliating his perceived foes than about following his strategy. As unpredictable and uncontrollable as he is to his allies, he is exactly that predictable and controllable to his enemies, and to America’s enemies.

The last six days proved Donald Trump is dangerously unfit for the presidency - Vox

[Admin]

Seems solid advice after a week dominated by Machado (the former Miss World) and now Trump's tax returns..

“What you’ve got to do, Donald, is talk to people sitting at home in their living rooms," said Farage, who’ll be one of Trump’s guests at the next debate, scheduled for Washington University in St. Louis on Oct. 9. “Don’t get involved in a catfight with Hillary.”

Farage’s Brexit movement and Trump’s rise in U.S. politics have both been fueled by older, working-class white voters spurred by nationalism, nostalgia, and economic dislocation. Trump has said that he sees parallels between his campaign and Brexit, and has at times dubbed himself “Mr Brexit.”

“Trump is part of a phenomenon that is now beginning to sweep the Western world," Farage said in a transcript provided by the network. “Simply, people want change."

Brexit Mastermind Tells Trump to Avoid Catfight With Clinton - Bloomberg Politics

Yes, many people indeed want change, but will the change brought by Brexit and a Trump presidency make these people any better off? We very much doubt it... (see various entries in the economics section, for instance about Trump's tax plans and why these aren't likely to work).

[Admin]

Here is what happened in the first debate..

 

[Admin]

Hannity din't get the memo..

Dana Blanton, vice president of public-opinion research at Fox News, had laid out clearly to network producers that unscientific online polls “do not meet our editorial standards” and should not be used on air.

Sean Hannity, evidently, did not get the memo. Hannity, taking a page out of Donald Trump’s playbook over the past week, has cited those unscientific online polls as supposed evidence the Republican nominee bested Hillary Clinton in Monday’s presidential debate, leading the charge of some of the network's hosts who had helped Trump push his post-debate message.

That was problematic because those types of web surveys, as Blanton noted, are grossly inaccurate — "nonsense." But time and time again, Hannity blatantly ignored her memo. Hours after it was distributed, he referenced the unscientific online polls on his television program. 

Then he did so again on Wednesday. And yet again on Thursday. The sequence has served as yet another sign that Hannity does not play by the same rules as his colleagues at Fox News. The Fox News host has seemed to be immune to the network’s editorial standards — or, as Washington Post media critic Erik Wemple suggested, “100% beyond the reach of Fox News management.”

Sean Hannity's online-polling foray reveals his Fox News island - Business Insider

[Admin]

Interesting debate strategy. Just lie...

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: I think the most important thing here for Trump is the morning after. He might have lost the debate. It was pretty close. It was not the route that people say it was. But he really threw it away the morning after when he went after -- he went down the rabbit holes on the Miss Universe and all the other stuff. And that's happened to him before. I think he can hold his own. He just needs to be -- to ignore, as everybody here has said -- ignore the bait. He should just dismiss all the quotations that he hears, the way that Pence did. Deny it ever happened and then ignore the fact checkers the next day. And then to pivot and to talk about her. The preparation he has to do is to learn a few things she said to focus in on her weaknesses on Benghazi, which he never mentioned, e-mails, other stuff. And then just have somebody remove the cell phone overnight at least for a week. I think he will be all right.

Charles Krauthammer Advises Donald Trump To Lie At Second Debate And “Ignore The Fact-Checkers”

[Admin]

The second debate was lost by the Republican Party, according to the Weekly Standard (which used to be the Republican publication par excellence..) He did just enough not to be kicked out as a candidate by the top of the party, but not good enough to have any realistic chance of winning the election.

There is one important sense in which Donald Trump "won" the debate on Sunday night: He did not implode. He wasn't "good," or attractive, or knowledgeable. He was coarse and whiny and unpleasant. He lied constantly. And he became the first presidential candidate in the history of our Republic to promise that if elected he would attempt to have his opponent face criminal prosecution. Actually, he went a bit further than that, telling Clinton that if he is president, "You'd be in jail." Which, by the by, should terrify you and be disqualifying all on its own.

But Trump didn't have a psychotic break onstage. And clearing that bar might be enough to keep Mike Pence, Paul Ryan, and Reince Priebus from publicly disavowing his candidacy this week. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is what a win looks like for Trump these days. We stand at a moment in history where dozens of Republican representatives, senators, and governors have not only publicly vowed not to vote for the Republican nominee but have called on him to vacate the nomination. Where four weeks before Election Day, one-in-four Republican voters want their nominee to drop out of the race. (And that number is almost certain to rise over the next week.)

The Debate's Biggest Loser Was the GOP | The Weekly Standard