Christ, that’s an understatement. Look, I’m not saying keeping the big jackass from being a jackass is going to be easy. I wouldn’t want that job. But… well, let me use a sports analogy; it’s the Super Bowl, you’re losing 24-17, and you’re at your own 32 yard line with seconds left. Do you try a Hail Mary or hold on to the ball?
Obviously, you have your quarterback air it out and hope for the best. You wouldn’t do that in the first quarter of a 0-0 game because it’s stupid; you run your playbook. But if you’re losing, and there’s no other way to win, you might as well heave it up there. It probably won’t work, but it might, and nothing else will.
If Clinton is leading by five or six points on September 26, what the hell else are they going to do?
That doesn’t quite capture the full effect of a Trump campaign. Trump’s campaign is headed for a scene where a train of dynamite shipments collides with a herd of genetically engineered dinosaurs that somehow escaped their restraints and stampeded onto the trestle, and the TNT cars and dinosaurs, roaring and flailing their legs and tails, fall off the side of the Grand Canyon and plunge into the SharpCo Ninja Products Factory, and THEN there’s a thunderous explosion that flings nunchuks and debris and ninja stars and bricks and swords and twisted train wreck parts and dinosaur bodies right into Saint Agnes’s Saintly Home For Incredibly Sweet And Precociously Gifted Children and it just happens to be the day that five hundred really nice couples showed up to take a cute little orphan home, and the orphanage explodes and there’s bodies and flaming wreckage everywhere and people have ninja stars in their foreheads and the only surviving orphans are crying because it’s the first time they ever saw a dinosaur and it’s just a severed head.
I think Trump will not debate, BUT he will not “drop out” or in any way simply fail to appear (which is perilously close to “fail to perform,” with its nasty connotations).
Trump will not debate but it will be SOMEONE ELSE’S FAULT, most likely Hillary’s. She or the Democrats or the weather or Obama (or Obamacare) or God or the Russians or someone **else **will prevent him from debating.
Something will happen that will make it IMPOSSIBLE for him to attend and still be Trump (A Legend in His Own Mind).
This. In a “normal” debate, with moderators who have balls, Trump would be a charcoal briquette. But these aren’t “normal” debates. All Trump has to do is go into all-out attack mode, ignoring all of Clinton’s responses and just throwing all sorts of random shit at her. That way his camp spins it as a win, and they ditch the rest of the debates. That gives them a month of spin on the attacks and free publicity.
Clinton will have to be very prepared for this tactic if she expects to get away from the “first” debate even remotely cleanly.
Undermine Trump’s support. Point out how he’s been on both sides of every issue. He’s been pro-choice to scare off the social conservatives. Anti-war to scare off the neo-conservatives. It’s not that you need to make their support of him weak…it’s that you need to try to peel off a small amount and make them stay home.
Hell, thank him for his donations to Clinton and the Clinton Foundation. Maybe shake up some of the hardcore anti-Hillary types.
It’s essentially this for Trump:
A) Debate Hillary, and have a 20% chance that he will do well and pull closer in the polls, maybe even take the lead - but also face an 80% chance that Hillary will prevail and make his deficit in the polls even worse, or,
B) Don’t debate Hillary, and simply languish in the polls, trailing Hillary as is.
This is akin to a Hail Mary situation in football. Throw the ball downfield, and you’ll run a high risk of losing all four of your downs and turning over the ball on possessions, or getting intercepted, or
…don’t throw the Hail Mary, and simply lose anyway.
Trump’s best bet is to start furiously preparing for the debates as if his life depends on them.
To extend the analogy… If you’re the Republican party (team), there may be a very good chance that if you run the hail mary play, your running backs will get concussions, and your front line will blow out their knees, rendering half your team injured for the next season. Your best bet may be to simply take a knee and concede the game, leaving your players healthier for next season.
And I concur - there is no way that Trump has either the ability or inclination to do any preparation for a debate. He already knows he’s right, and he knows everything there is to know.
OK, how about show up on the day like a kid who has an oral report on WW2 due but never cracked open a book, and furiously tries to bluff his way through the whole thing based on what he remembers from watching the Captain America Movie.
I’ve heard several times that Trump’s numbers actually went down after his appearance on stage during debates, not up. Here is one citation that supports that.
Agreed. I’m wondering more and more whether he’s so wildly off script on purpose (the ol’ throwing the race ploy) or he’s completely off his nut. It’s incomprehensible that he could be this idiotic accidentally.
I tried to read this to my family and couldn’t squeeze the words out between fits of laughter. Well done.
No idea if Trump will go through with the debates, but I sure hope so. My daughter is a senior at Washington U. in St. Louis, where the second, town hall style, debate will take place on October 9. She just found out this morning that her application to be in the student volunteer pool has been accepted, so she really wants it to happen now. Most likely she’ll end up ushering or directing visitors on campus, but her dream is to work backstage or in the green rooms. She’ll get her assignment in a few weeks when she’s back on campus.
It’s getting closer to debate time. Who believes Trump will attend ALL of the Presidential debates?
I can still see him bailing on all of them with some lame excuse or other, but I can also see him attending one of them and then [del]crying[/del] whining foul, and skipping the rest. Only he’ll call it “boycotting,” as if there is some principle behind it.
Trump has nothing to gain from debating and much to lose.
I believe Trump will absolutely do the first one, and contrary to popular opinion, he could do surprisingly well. The advantage goes to the candidate with lower expectations, which would clearly be Trump.
People assume that Trump is going to be the same Trump that we saw in the debates, but I’m not so sure. I think Ailes is trying to prepare him to be aggressive without engaging into the petulant child routine that we saw in some of his latter appearances.
The question is, what happens after the first debate? If Trump wins, does he try to say “I won and I’m tired of these debates,” or does he come back again? Or if he loses, especially if he loses badly, does he try to cut losses?
I think Trump will do the debates because Trump probably needs them more in order to win. But he may not have to do all three.
'Course, if he walks up to the podium and staples his pecker to it, someone will be down here telling us what a brilliant debate tactic that was! Hillary sure wasn’t expecting that!
I don’t think Trump can win with being a shock jock – that was a good tactic with angry, uneducated conservatives. They’re both going for large numbers of ignorant voters and disengaged voters but they’re probably a little more mature and they will demand a little more than jokes about penis sizes. Moreover, being too harsh against a woman, even one who’s broadly disliked, would not play well on camera. Ailes is probably telling him to be aggressive, bring up Bengazi, bring up emails, and redirect questions about everything else to Bengazi and emails. But he’s probably advising him to lay off the penis jokes.
