First, let me say that I didn’t watch the “debate”. Now, you may think that, given that admission, I have no right to express an opinion about the goings on in Cleveland. But this is America, a place where everyone has the right to express their opinion, regardless of their state of ignorance. In fact, there are people who are paid big bucks to express their opinions, even though they almost always turn out to be wrong. If one were to look back over my blog posts over the years, you’d find, I’m sure, that my batting average is far better than the average talking head on the Sunday morning shows, even if you add Paul Krugman into the mix.
Anyway, this morning one of our houseguests read a portion of Frank Bruni’s column in this morning’s Times to us, in which he praises the Fox folks for doing what no other television reporters can do: hold Republicans to account. If anyone else does it, you see, they are accused of bias, a situation Bruni appears to feel is the natural order of things. According to Bruni, Donald Trump was mauled by the righteous folks at Fox, starting with his refusal to rule out a third party run:
Trump alone wouldn’t make those promises, even though the moderator who asked that question, Bret Baier, pointed out that such a third-party run would likely hand the presidency to the Democratic nominee.
And thus, in the first minute of the debate, Trump was undressed and unmasked, and he stood there as the unprincipled, naked egomaniac that he is. He never quite recovered. His admission of political infidelity was the prism through which all of his subsequent bluster had to be viewed.
…
I do think that Trump lost: He said nothing, not one syllable, that infused his candidacy with any of the gravitas that it sorely needs, and there was something pouty and petulant about his whole performance. Some of his rivals managed, even under the Fox fire, to look grateful to be there and to enjoy themselves, at least a bit. Marco Rubio did.
Now, I’d already read Josh Marshal’s take on the debate. Josh, not being a highly paid talking head on a major network news show also happens to be right more often than he’s wrong, so I was willing to tentatively accept his conclusion that Donald Trump did just fine:
On balance, I think this debate went about as we’d expected. Donald Trump dominated the debate. Even when he wasn’t talking. Fox took it upon itself to go after him hard. But mainly they didn’t land a punch. With one key exception (when and how he became a Republican), Trump managed to parry pretty much all the questions sent his way, despite most answers totally lacking any substance, lacking any logical coherence, or in most cases not even addressing the questions. Perhaps I’ll be wrong. But I don’t think his refusal to pledge not to run as an independent will hurt him. He didn’t equivocate. He just said it. More than anything, he knows his audience.
This sounds right to me. Methinks Mr. Bruni is approaching this as if the people Trump and his opponents are trying to impress are rational people who care about things like “gravitas”. They’re not. As Krugman rightly points out today, as he has on so many occasions, the modern Republican Party is not about facts or gravitas:
For while it’s true that Mr. Trump is, fundamentally, an absurd figure, so are his rivals. If you pay attention to what any one of them is actually saying, as opposed to how he says it, you discover incoherence and extremism every bit as bad as anything Mr. Trump has to offer. And that’s not an accident: Talking nonsense is what you have to do to get anywhere in today’s Republican Party.
Oddly enough, the folks at Fox seem to fail to understand the political world they have created. For some reason, the thought of a Trump candidacy scares them. Not so the possible candidacies of the other loonies that have come forward to offer to complete the destruction of the Republic. Trump is the natural outgrowth of the Fox phenomenon. He is giving the people what they’ve been taught to want. The folks at Fox don’t want him because they see him as an ultimate loser. But do they have any reason to think any of the others are ultimate winners? In fact, I’ll stick my neck out and say that, at this point, from the Democrats point of view, Trump is no longer the dream Republican candidate. That prediction is tentative, but I’d put some money on this one: nothing that happened last night will hurt Trump with the Republican base. Sooner or later, the folks at Fox may have to swallow hard and line up behind the Donald. He’s taking advantage of the fact that his opposition is made up mainly of people who have never successfully finished their apprenticeships.
Post a Comment