2016 Postmortem
Related: About this forumRepublicans in Denial That the Debate Exposed Donald Trump As Unfit for Office
By Jonathan Chait
If youre a Republican who has been clinging to the wan hope that Donald Trump might somehow, in his eighth decade on Earth, develop into a plausibly competent president of the United States, the first debate should have been your moment to abandon ship. Trump displayed the factual command of a small child, the emotional stability of a hormonal teen, and the stamina of an old man, staggering and losing the thread as the 90 minutes wore on. Instead, Republicans without a single exception I have seen have responded very differently. They have treated their candidates glaring unsuitability for high office as, at worst, a handful of discrete errors that in no way reflect on his character, and at best, the dastardly unfairness of the liberal media.
Among the optimists was conservative columnist Holman Jenkins, who registered his approval with the candidates ability to clear two impressive hurdles: make it through the debate without literally dying, and display the ability to make at least one planned action. He is not a lifelong politician like Mrs. Clinton and it showed, writes Jenkins. But he survived on stage. Notice, he also apparently made a strategic decision not to raise Bill Clintons infidelities and stuck to it. Jenkins is at least conceding implicitly that the debate would be considered a loss for Trump if he had keeled over dead. But to pat him on the head for having made a strategic decision i.e., a decision not to attack Hillary Clinton for her husbands infidelity and then follow it is setting the bar very low. The ability to follow through on a decision is a developmental step in children that ranks just above object permanence. (Perhaps Jenkins would be impressed if Clinton left during a break and Trump noticed she was gone.) The triumph of Trump planning not to bring up the affairs, and then managing not to, is also mitigated by the fact that he immediately expressed his regret for it afterward.
National Review, which had published a splashy issue devoted to denouncing Trump during the primary, used its post-debate editorial not to remind readers that the array of disqualifying traits it had once denounced were on vivid display, but instead to chastise moderator Lester Holt for exposing them. We have our criticisms of Donald Trump, too, wrote National Review, in the only* sentence in the editorial that even hinted at any flaw on Trumps part. But his electoral fate should be up to the voters, not Lester Holt and his colleagues. Likewise, Paul Beston decried Holts query to both candidates if they would respect the outcome of the election as his lowest moment, asking indignantly, [H]ow he could even pose such a question. Perhaps Holt asked because Trump has repeatedly called the election rigged and told his supporters that massive fraud is the only way we can lose.
Holts alleged bias was a favorite subject on the right. Every question that exposed Trumps unprecedented violation of political norms simply proved to conservatives that their party was being singled out for unprecedented scrutiny. Conservatives expressed a mix of resentment and confusion that Trump faced hostile questions and scrutiny for his refusal to take the expected and routine step of releasing his tax returns. They present Trump as an innocent man, guilty of nothing worse than failing to adequately defend himself. These columns warned Mr. Trumpand GOP votersduring the primaries that by not releasing his returns he was giving Democrats an opening to assert what he might be hiding, warns The Wall Street Journal. Note the scare quotes around the term hiding, as if it is a hyperbolic and unfair term to apply to the act of not revealing something that is customarily shared. Trump did not refute Clintons charge reminiscent of Harry Reids no-evidence attack on Mitt Romney in 2012 that Trump pays no federal income taxes, complains Byron York. That makes me smart, Trump said, which sounded, if anything, like a confirmation of Clintons accusation. The charge had no evidence, yet Trump said words that sounded to people who understand words like a confirmation of the charge almost as if the charge is somehow true. Is it possible that Trump is refusing to disclose his returns because they would show something disqualifying? Conservatives do not even consider the scenario anymore. Trump is simply the victim of a combination of insinuation and his own poor salesmanship.
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http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/09/republicans-in-denial-that-debate-exposed-trump-as-unfit.html
tonyt53
(5,737 posts)canetoad
(17,184 posts)And unusual for these days in that it has good, long, content-filled paragraphs unlike the usual one or two liners for the focus-challenged.