It’s all good political theatre; posture, presentation, rebuttals, zingers, historical revisionism, he said, they said, it was on Fox news, anonymous polls of battle ground states say etc.
As a centre piece for selecting POTUS?
It’s how you’d pick from a selection of local belles the Queen of the Spring Fair.
There is bugger all debating of policy.
And when on that odd occasion one of the candidates announces an initiative “I will announce XXX XXX XXX for all Americans on my first day in office” there isn’t (as there is in less sophisticated democracies) that little Jimminy Cricket voice chirping up from the background saying “… and where is the money coming from?”
Looks like Trump is weaseling out of a second debate, claiming that “there’s no need since I won this one”. He lives in a fantasy world of narcissism and denial. I noticed that at the 9/11 memorial, he was eager to shake her hand for the cameras. She gave him a death stare.
It’s like a comedy film where a bully goes up to a new guy sitting in a chair and threatens him, and when the new stands up and reveals himself to a hulking behemoth, the bully says, “Since you’re new I’ll hold off on kicking your ass this one time.” Trying to play off the fact that he’s terrified and knows he’ll get destroyed.
The Atlantic puts it well in an article today by Wehner.
Over the course of debate, Trump defended the violent mob that had attacked the Capitol. He insisted that the 2020 election had been stolen from him. He relitigated his slander of the Central Park Five. He defended his decision to invite the Taliban to Camp David and invoked Hungary’s authoritarian leader, Viktor Orbán, as a character witness. He couldn’t bring himself to say that he hopes Ukraine will win its war against Russia, even when pressed. And he spent valuable time emphatically insisting that the multiple indictments against him are “fake cases.”
But that’s not all. Trump savaged people he had appointed to his administration who have since broken with him. He repeated his claim that Harris wasn’t Black. And then there was the pièce de résistance: Trump spreading the conspiracy theory, weird even by his standards, that in Springfield, Ohio, Haitian migrants are abducting and devouring their neighbors’ pets. “They’re eating the dogs!” he roared. “The people that came in—they’re eating the cats!” And he still couldn’t stop himself. When one of the moderators, ABC’s David Muir, rebutted Trump’s claim, the former president said, “I’ve seen people on television! People on television say, ‘My dog was taken and used for food!’”
Look, it was cold in the arena. Some shrinkage is to be expected.
Yes, Exodus 32 is sadly applicable to Trump. He is not God’s Chosen; he is the golden idol worshipped by those who have turned away from God. I mean, they literally had a golden statue of him at CPAC.
One of his campaign staffers said last night on CNN that Trump had already ‘accepted the invitation’ to the 9/25 debate on NBC, and they were waiting on Harris to respond. I don’t believe that NBC has ever announced this, and it’s something that Trump dreamed up a few weeks ago.
Scripps News article which basically says the same thing.
Trump’s campaign said it has accepted an invitation to meet on NBC News on September 25, but the Harris campaign has yet to accept such an invitation.
That sounds a lot like the first Back to the Future, when Biff is about to fight Marty in the school cafeteria, but sees the principal, and says, “since you’re new here, I’m gonna let you off with a warning.”
Except, of course, no one would ever consider Marty to be “hulking.”
China installed equal tariffs on American goods. Now the remainings tariffs are harder to remover. The tariffs on sheet metal were bad. We do not make every grade of sheet metal. They have to be imported for certain products. Now from Europe. The tariffs are not a solution. Name some Trump policy that is still of use.
An interesting debate analysis (limited gift link from The Economist). Includes most characteristic words by each candidate, variation in voice frequency (as a proxy for emotional arousal) summarizing “the debate in five charts”. Worth a look.
So does only one person get to read an Economist gift link? Because I see that it was just posted, and it already says “Gift code expired You’ve just missed out—this gift’s been used up.”
If so, I would say that gift links from The Economist are not of much use for a message board. They seem more suited to sharing an article with a single friend. No dig on you of course, @Dr_Paprika.
