One hour and one minute into the first presidential debate, Donald Trump finally mentioned, in passing, the word that had gotten him this far: “border.”
And then Trump immediately forgot to bring up borders anymore, other than a rushed reference to the Border Patrol endorsing him. (He touched very briefly three times on “immigration.”)
Not surprisingly, Trump’s two opponents, Hillary Clinton and Lester Holt, didn’t bring up borders.
Trump can hardly rely on them. NBC’s Holt had heard plenty of “you’ll never work in this town again” threats from his colleagues in the press if he didn’t bias the questions against Trump more than Matt Lauer had at a lower-key Clinton-Trump forum on Sept. 7.
Holt did an expert job of tilting his moderation toward Hillary while still giving Trump a fighting chance. Sure, that’s not fair, but that’s the best Trump can expect in the debates.
At this point Trump is on track to rank, along with Henry Clay, William Jennings Bryan, Al Smith, Barry Goldwater, and George McGovern, as one of the finest losers in American history. To win, however, Trump’s effort is going to have to be even more heroic than it has been to get him to where he is.
* It’s the first time I recall seeing him debating while he was sick. We don’t know if it was a cold, or full blown flu. If it was the latter, you can get sick enough to feel dissociated from your surroundings enough that it will affect your performance. Also, if it was the latter, considering the pounding of Hillary regarding her health, he wouldn’t volunteer any information about his.
The major flaw in his performance is he was on defense, instead of always taking the initiative. His debate style is certainly like “Patton in the Field.” Patton never intentionally fell back, defended, or held ground. He kept moving forward, always taking initiative, which usually kept his opposition off-balance. That’s how Donald’s gotten away with so much, and literally changed the game.
If I were managing his debates, I’d make a list of every charge the opposition could make, and preload a response using a past Hillary incident related in theme, followed by committed indignation, and a demand for her to apologize and repent. Since Hillary has SO much material, debating her should be like shooting fish in a barrel. I’d also consider the debate host to be an agent for the opposition, and always keep it in mind, and dismiss “small” questions like Fat Dumb Pigwoman Rosie O’Donnell, while delineating the difference between an entertainment entrepreneur’s motivation, and a politician’s.
It could be he was just sick. It could be he was testing the media waters in this context before he starts leaning into her, while taking a conservative approach. Could have been both. In any case, as we’ve all noticed, it’s often a fool’s errand to second-guess Trump by conventional reasoning.
* I don’t think he was sick. I’ve noticed him breathing through his nose like that every time he speaks. What might have been different at the debate, suggested Rush Limbaugh, is the compression setting on the audio from Trump’s mic, which may have magnified the sound of his breathing.
* Stephen Miller probably needs someone whose known Trump a lot longer to convince Trump to prep for the next debate. I don’t know who that person might be. It doesn’t look like it’s going to be Trump’s consigliere, Michael Cohen. I don’t know how much advice Trump takes from his sons. He would probably listen to his daughter Ivanka, but she’s friends with Chelsea and very nice.
The best bets might be Ivanka’s husband, or Ann Coulter, if she can get through.
* One aspect everyone seems to have missed is that Ivanka’s friendship with Chelsea dulled Trump’s aggressiveness. Trump eliptically admitted the same.
Why do folks on both sides think it’s possible to be friends with the enemy? In reality, the capitalist class is united against the working class.
* Donald Trump doesn’t have attention span to go over those responses, so we’re just stuck with whatever’s in his head at a particular moment.
* The online-daily Japantoday had it this way on may, 10th:”So what explains Trump’s astonishing political success? The best explanation was given in October by, of all people, the legendary rock star Alice Cooper, who said, “I know Donald, and I know he’s a ‘doer.’ He’s not a ‘sayer.’”
* Do you really think Kelly Anne Conway didn’t know what debate prep is supposed to be done? Please. It wasn’t because no one near him understood how you prepare for a debate.
He won’t do it. It takes sustained work in a manner he can’t do. He has had the last 15 months to learn this stuff, but he didn’t care, he didn’t think he needed to, etc. He can’t.
God help us.
* Trump needs to explicitly direct his immigration reduction message to women. Trump has to repetitively pound home the message that mass immigration and illegal immigration are harming the United States. Trump must say that he will protect and defend the United States from danger.
Trump might say: “The United States is suffering under the strain of mass immigration. The current US immigration policy of allowing well over a million legal immigrants into the country every year is pushing the United States to the breaking point. I use the term mass immigration because that is what is going on — one million plus immigrants a year is too much. The United States must reduce legal mass immigration and stop illegal immigration cold.”
Trump might say: “Mass immigration is damaging the United States. Mass immigration swamps schools, overwhelms hospitals, lowers wages and harms the environment. Mass immigration brings radical Islamic terrorism to the United States. Mass immigration brings infectious diseases such as TB and Ebola to the United States. Mass immigration destroys cultural cohesion. Mass immigration makes it harder for young people to affordably form their own new families. We must defend and protect the United States by bringing the era of mass immigration to an end.”
* I watched Frontline last night. This is OT but out of the many things I noticed was that they went on at length about Trump’s divorces and Bill Clinton’s affairs but they did not talk directly about or frame it in terms of Hillary’s sexuality. Trump is running against Hillary, not Bill and we already know what he did. Of course, this is the media’s way of protecting her and women in general but the more I reflect on it the weirder it becomes. They did not connect the dots regarding Hillary’s position on birth control and her lack of progeny and how is can effect marriage or her 2nd wave ambivalence to marriage and the lack of comfort her husband seemed to find in it. They also completely ignored her attacks on the women her husband had affairs with. Frontline referred to Monica’s blue dress as a “souvenir” rather than as evidence which is why it was kept. Trump and Bill are actors, Hillary is acted on; except when it is for cool tank girl stuff.
* There is little Trump can do; the problem is not his performance in the debates but the fracturing of White society. This fracturing is not a Jewish conspiracy but the real and profound differences between elites and ordinary people and men and women.
Elites form a hereditary, semi-feudal class controlling politics, aping the Chinese Communist Party. One doesn’t get rich to be powerful — one gets powerful like Clinton to be rich. Hillary and Obama, both non-entities in accomplishment, wield more power than even Mark Zuckerberg. And they wield the power because they are an aging harpy feminist, and an anti-White Black man respectively.
Which taps into the secret weapon of elites — the bitter resentment of White women particularly the Professional Class over their male peers. Not only are too many White men nerdy/unsexy, they create social and technological chaos by rapid technological change that improves lives and makes settled aristocracy difficult.
* Scott Adams was right: Trump came out with one goal—seem less scary/more presidential—and he succeeded at it.
Hillary had a number of goals: make Trump scary; not fall down; offer a message that will excite voters; make herself appear trustworthy; make herself seem presidential.
She failed on all of those points but one: she didn’t fall down or show signs of her Parkinson’s—at least obvious signs.
Trump has been trumpeting his restraint at the debate, which is the right way to go. He’s emphasizing his demeanor as presidential, which is what your mom and your milqutoast democrat male relatives want to see. He’s already got those of us who want a bruiser; now he’s just showing he knows when to be a bruiser and when to be gentler. (BTW, this was probably difficult for him to do in public, because he’s used to showing his bruiser side as his public side and then going gentler behind closed doors. Trump’s a skillful business man, and he never likes giving away too much of his game up front, so he’s not used to displaying his restraint in front of an audience).
Meanwhile, Hillary made a number of own-goal statements that may come back to haunt her. She kept saying things that create triggers that lead the public back to her faults. Some statements included:
-”special prosecutor”–not only bringing up her husband’s scandals, but also the idea floating that she needs a special prosecutor for her actions, as the FBI/Justice department is too close to her
-”Russia”-she caused the current bad-relations with Russia.
-”Saudi Arabia”- bringing up your biggest donors? Not a good plan.
-”tax returns”–Trump skillfully tied this to her email hiding. By trying to make Trump seem sneaky, she made her own sneakiness front and center. But it also brought up the Clinton Foundation’s money-laundering operation.
-”Solar power”-Trump brought up Solyndra, although he failed to recall the name, which would have been better.
I was surprised she didn’t accidentally bring up immigration and her health herself, the way she was going. Part of Trump’s restraint may have been not interrupting your opponent while they’re making a mistake.
* Trump has never been a big reader. So he is not particularly articulate. But by not being a big reader, he has avoided being brainwashed by the ideas that corp/gov/media has put into our culture.
* Steve’s concept of Magic Dirt is more useful than I at first grasped. Initially, my understanding of it was in the context of Chetty’s demographic work that demonstrated how certain zip codes in America showed the greatest likelihood for a person’s wealth increasing over the course of their lives. So, Chetty reasoned, if all of America’s poor people just pulled up stakes and moved to these zip codes, then they would become fabulously wealthy.
A similar type of reasoning prevailed in the Marxist takeover in Rhodesia. The Revolutionaries thought that if they could only wrest the land from whitey, then they, the oppressed people of color, would be free at last. And so the white land-owning farmers were dispossessed.
But, as we all know, things didn’t turn out as planned. The new owners weren’t interested in farming and so the fields were left fallow. Instead of farming, the owners strip mined the tangible assets, selling the irrigation pipes and copper wiring from the homes for scrap. Disaster followed as famine swept the land and many starved, creating an international crisis which is only ameliorated by aid intervention by countries in which farming is still carried out by whites.
So, one could say that the Marxists who carried out the revolution and land redistribution in Zimbabwe also fell into the “magic dirt” trap. They, like you Tiny Duck, believe that wealth derives from some thing; that it inheres in a commodity such as copper or aluminum or soil. But as any sensible person realizes, wealth is created by a process, a system that is the product of human genius and applied technique. As Lao Tzu would say, the “worth” of a pipe lies in the hole created in the middle and not in the bare scrap value of the material surrounding that hole.
It’s interesting in this regard to note that Obama’s father’s graduate thesis while at Harvard touched on just this subject. Should we, he asked himself, once we have seized the farms from the evil white Kenyan landholders, redistribute it as small parcels to individual families or should we organize it into huge collective farms? And so he compared the likelihood of yields based upon calculations of relative efficiency. He simply takes it for granted that Kenyans would want to farm and would be good at it, assuming that the productive capacity somehow inheres in the redistributed soil and not in the native genius of the people.
