August 17, 2016 11:25 AM UTC

How to Survive Until Election Day

• 5 Comments
• by: doko

(Promoted by Colorado Pols)

Face it. When there are only two candidates remaining and one of them is named Trump, you can’t be blamed for panic attacks. After all, something unexpected can occur during any election season that determines the outcome. Another scandal for the Democrats and it may be bedtime for Clinton. Or if a hacker leaks Trump’s tax returns, the question is not whether he will suffer any humiliations, but how many. However, you can’t spend the next ten weeks speculating and worrying about what might occur. Instead, focus on what the primary season has demonstrated and you just may get a better night’s sleep.

The Story of Trump Being A Force Of Nature Who Conquered The Republican Party Is Being Told By An Unreliable Narrator. 

Most of the media following Trump have let everyone down. From broadcasting ‘press conferences’ in which the reporters’ questions cannot be heard, to placing an image continuously on the screen of Trump’s empty podium for nearly an hour while breathlessly waiting for the oracle to appear, to permitting Trump to call into a national Sunday news show for an ‘interview’, the Fifth Estate acted as if aiding and abetting the dissemination of a campaign’s chronicle is preferable to hard reporting. So when the Trump campaign shouts that it won the primaries in a ‘landslide’ and the media endlessly repeats that Trump vanquished a field of 17 candidates on the way to winning more votes than ever in Republican primary history, it’s easy to be lured into thinking that’s what actually happened.

Hogwash.  Eleven of the 17 candidates (Rick Perry, Scott Walker, Bobby Jindal, Lindsey Graham, George Pataki, Mike Huckabee, Rand Paul, Rick Santorum, Carly Fiorina, Chris Christie, and Jim Gilmore) were going to be vanquished by any other breathing participant, as they essentially defeated themselves. Ben Carson had no chance of overtaking competitors who were skillful enough to stay awake during an entire debate. Jeb Bush had tremendous name recognition, unfortunately stemming from a name that no Republican may utter. Combined with his so-called moderation, he was destined to be toast. For that reason, it was a miracle that John Kasich lasted as long as he did, given that his moderate extremism was still too far to the left. Marco Rubio made the fatal mistake of not taking Trump’s candidacy seriously, and when Rubio finally had that Eureka! moment, the rules of proportionate delegate allocation made it prohibitively difficult for him to catch up. In effect, Trump defeated one candidate on the way to becoming the nominee, Ted Cruz, the most disliked Senator of the Republican Party since Joseph McCarthy.

In defeating Mr. Cruz and the others, Trump received only a 45% plurality of the vote. That’s hardly the ‘landslide’ crowed about by Trump, especially because the approximate 14,000,000 votes received by Trump includes 2,225,000 of the 3,000,000 votes cast on the last primary day of the season, when Trump was running unopposed. That’s right, even when Trump was already the presumptive nominee and all other campaigns had ceased, at least 25% of Republican voters in the final States chose to vote against Trump. According to Trump, his record-breaking receipt of 14,000,000 votes is supposed to be evidence  of his bringing new voters into the Republican Party and of his monumental support. But that argument can be turned on its head. The primary voting could instead be explained as a record-breaking 17,000,000 Republican voters who chose to vote for anyone but Trump.

Trump Can’t Handle One-On-One Debates.

Another media misstep has been its reporting on how Trump survived and thrived through the myriad Republican debates, and repeating without analysis Trump’s boast about clobbering the other candidates, all of which could lure people into believing that there was a direct relationship between Trump’s debating skills and his becoming the nominee. Nothing could be further from the truth. Here’s why.

To say that Trump is not a detail guy is to make one of the most understated assertions in American politics. The failure to  know or to be able to retrieve facts is irrelevant in a ‘debate’ comprised of ten or five or even three candidates, where moderators have little control over the process, more than one person speaking simultaneously is the norm, and the sense of obligation to give each participant some speaking time makes it virtually impossible to conduct any effective follow-up questioning. Debates conducted under those circumstances are perfect for an ill-informed candidate whose modus operandi is to give some loose fitting response that barely addresses the question being asked, followed up immediately by a loud diatribe. Because Trump’s lack of a command of facts relating to his candidacy is so broad, the only suspense involved whenTrump was questioned during the Republican debates was whether his attack would be against another candidate or the questioner.

This will not play well when there are just two candidates on the stage. Trump has only proposed three concrete policies: build the wall, exclude the Muslims, and, addressing an issue that has energized Americans for decades, loosen the libel laws to make it easier for public figures such as Trump to sue people who criticize him. As he is incapable of learning and retrieving the information that would allow him to intelligently respond to questions on any other issue, whether he preps for the debates or not, his responses during the debates with Clinton will consist only of giving a sentence or two that will appear to (but actually doesn’t) respond to some portion of the question, and then pivoting to attack Clinton personally. The attack will be unrelenting because Trump will recognize the need to take some time off of the clock. The optics of this will be terrible for Trump. A tipping point will come when viewers will wonder if they are watching a debate or someone pummeling a baby seal. That won’t deter any of Trump’s hard core hater base, the ones who think they are being kind for suggesting that Clinton should be tortured only after she is killed. But it will do wonders for Clinton’s likeability numbers with other voters.

There is no question that Clinton will be prepared to answer questions that may be posed to her during the debates, and she has two months for her team to prepare responses to the categories of ad hominem attacks that are certain to come from Trump. That’s why after the first debate, Trump will cancel the remainder by raising bogus claims of unfair moderators or new disagreements on the rules. That won’t be good for Trump either.

Trump’s Off-Message Pronouncements Will Drive Away Additional Support.

Trump’s base of law and order voters who wouldn’t mind blowing up the system isn’t going anywhere, no matter what he says. Even so, Trump is fishing for other voters, and to accomplish that he needs other hooks. His problem is that his off-message comments offer nothing to those who are not already committed to him. This is a problem both of his own making and of third parties who are now in a position to augment their efforts until election day.

Trump has debilitating personality traits that are apparent to everyone, most prominently his thin skin and pathological need to gloat. These explain why, without outside urgings, he was still exulting the defeat of his primary opponents well after he was already the nominee. But these qualities are particularly ripe for manipulation by others. That’s why the “short fingers” comment headlined a ten day news cycle when it should not have lasted more than ten minutes. Elizabeth Warren has proven herself to be the master in knowing how to push Trump’s buttons on Twitter, and there will undoubtedly be others added to her team during the next few months. This is where Trump’s phony denial of his support for the Iraq War can be juxtaposed with a link to the Howard Stern interview in which he said the opposite. This is where Trump’s refusal to release his tax returns can be pounded. This is where off-handed questions and trial balloons can be posed, such as whether Trump will be conducting any joint campaign appearances with David Duke. This is where new belittlements of Trump’s personality and career can be pressed by surrogates.

All of these will be followed up by pouncing comebacks, because Trump’s brain has no regulator that separates the harmless from the material, the laughable from the serious. He is compelled to address every criticism, from every source, in the same attacking mode, and his responses are wildly extreme and mostly irrelevant. As with his expected devastating performance in the debate(s), these constant unthinking retorts will not deter his base but won’t build upon it either.

So vote early, take a vacation, unplug the TV, stay off the news sites, and return in November to watch the results.