Trump's Vile Game of Distraction
Given the potential for a conservative civil war, the second presidential debate of 2016 feels almost like an afterthought already, and we should not fail to recognize the man who made it so.
Maybe the fact that the debate was nearly the same drubbing as the first has something to do with its immediate sense of transience. Without Donald Trump setting an all-time record for comprehensive failure in a debate, this debate might not have dropped like a rushed sophomore album. On its own, it would have charted sky-high, but, well, you already heard this material.
Hillary Clinton again came off better factually, but this is America, where trees cause air pollution and 1977's Community Reinvestment Act caused the 2008 Great Recession. Clinton came off temperamentally better, too; then again, back in 2000, the dry-drunk scion of a Connecticut banking clan, who bought a Major League Baseball team, became "the guy you could have a beer with."
It will be easy for TV analysts to focus on a few things. Trump loomed behind Clinton as she gave an answer. He whined that Clinton and the moderators made it "three against one" and appeared to agree with the New York Times report that he hasn't paid federal income tax for several years. His response to questions about his talking about assaulting a woman by "[grabbing] her pussy" would have been embarrassing even by the expectations you'd have for a middle manager of a mid-tier office supply company. If he wins, he vows to jail Hillary Clinton, another authoritarian stroke from a candidate whose preference for epaulette-free suits is about the only thing standing between him and the title "Generalissimo" anymore.
All these moments are fodder for very earnest discussions about temperament, optics, misogyny and disdain for the political process, and all of them can and will be automatically absorbed or cast off by followers depending on their voting allegiances. You could probably gin up the compensatory rationalizations yourself now. Lol, as the anhedonic Twitterati refrain goes, nothing matters.
But what should matter very much is what happens now that Donald Trump has taken the Republican Party's beautiful dream of a permanent Christian ethnocentric oligarchy in his hands and snapped it into little pieces.
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/donald-trumps-second-presidential-debate-distraction-strategy-w444091?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_content=daily&utm_campaign=101016_11
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