Trump Debate Quotes

Discourse and critical thinking are essential tools when it comes to securing progress in a democratic society. But in the end, unity and engaged participation are what make it happen.

Guns make small men feel big.

There is never a moment where I find Trump persuasive. When I look at him I see a man without any inner life. I see the most superficial person on Earth. This is a guy who has been totally hollowed out by greed and self regard and delusion. If I caught some sort of brain virus and I started talking about myself the way Trump talks about himself, I would throw myself out a fucking window. That barely overstates it. Do you remember that scene at the end of The Exorcist where the priest is driving out the devil from Linda Blair and the devil comes into him and he just hurls himself out the window to end all the madness? Well, it would be like that.

Our kids are fighting for a world more just and more righteous than we had ever dared to dream of. The debates we have about gay marriage, transgender bathroom rights, immigration, whether it’s ‘all lives matter’ or ‘black lives matter’ have been largely settled in the social world of our youth and they are looking at us dismayed and perplexed at why we just don’t get it. In the days after the election of Donald Trump, my older son and a few hundred of his classmates walked out of class and marched to city hall. They were angry and frightened. They had been working so hard to build a better, more inclusive world, and we adults had just royally fucked it up for them. My son sent me video of the protest and I posted it online. Quite a few adults commented: “Shouldn’t these kids be learning instead of protesting?” But they had been learning, far more than we apparently had, and that was why they were protesting.

Ailes said they were there for their weekly debate prep. The first presidential debate against Hillary Clinton was a month and a half away, on September 26. “Debate prep?” Bannon said. “You, Christie and Rudy?” “This is the second one.” “He’s actually prepping for the debates?” Bannon said, suddenly impressed. “No, he comes and plays golf and we just talk about the campaign and stuff like that. But we’re trying to get him in the habit.

For anyone who knows Russia, Trump’s aim in the use of the word ‘hoax’ is uncannily familiar,” he said. “In Russia the regime dismisses any criticism as ‘information war,’ thus making any kind of evidence-based debate impossible: All information is just a weapon, a form of manipulation, there is no rational ground on which to have a debate, you are either ‘with us’ or ‘against us.

Meeting people whose life trajectories were so different from my own enlarged my way of thinking. Outside the school, arguments over refugees were raging, but the time I had spent inside the building showed me that those conversations were based on phantasms. People were debating their own fears. What I had witnessed taking place inside this school every day revealed the rhetoric for what it was: more propaganda than fact. Donald Trump appeared to believe his own assertions, but I hoped that in the years to come, more people would be able to recognize refugees for who they really were--simply the most vulnerable people on earth.

Philippe took his character study very seriously, including the physicality. Trump looms and lurks on a debate stage, so Philippe did too, always hanging out on the edge of my peripheral vision. He wore a suit like Trump’s (a little baggy), a tie like Trump’s (way too long), and actual Trump-brand cuff links and a Trump-brand watch he found on eBay. He wore three-and-a-half-inch shoe heighteners, flailed his arms like Trump, shrugged and mugged like Trump. I didn’t know whether to applaud or fire him.

Instead the analysts debated whether Kim Jong Un was a brilliant, strategic genius manipulating other countries, including the U.S., or an inexperienced, impulsive fool.

Voters responded so well to Trump’s reference to Sykes and Pryor in debates and speeches that he decided to make a longer list of judges who met with conservative approval.

He just keeps going,” Ailes had marveled to a friend after the first debate with Hillary Clinton. “You hit Donald along the head, and he keeps going. He doesn’t even know he’s been hit.

In that regard, one final clarification is in order. Trump is now the most powerful head of state in the world, and one of the most impulsive, arrogant, ignorant, disorganized, chaotic, nihilistic, self-contradictory, self-important, and self-serving. He has his finger on the triggers of a thousand or more of the most powerful thermonuclear weapons in the world. That means he could kill more people in a few seconds than any dictator in past history has been able to kill during his entire years in power. Indeed, by virtue of his office, Trump has the power to reduce the unprecedentedly destructive world wars and genocides of the twentieth century to minor footnotes in the history of human violence. To say merely that he is “dangerous” is debatable only in the sense that it may be too much of an understatement.

In addition to amplifying polarization, the report concluded, social media tends to undermine trust in institutions and makes it more difficult to have the sorts of fact-based debates and discussions that are essential to democracy.

on. It took a Trump to look her in the eye with seventy million people watching during one of the presidential debates and say, “You are a liar and a crook,” which she was both. Everybody knew it, but only Donald Trump dared to utter it out loud.

Trump is the Kim Kardashian of American politics, replacing substance with solipsism and issues debates with Twitter feuds, and showing a rare talent for grabbing the attention of an ADD nation round the clock as he tries to be Troll in Chief. “Celebrity

Although Galen was a great physician, he was not a terribly courageous man. Galen was a self-promotor above anything else. According to McLynn, he consistently claimed to be a self-made man, casually downplaying the fact that he can from an extremely wealthy family and had inherited numerous estates as well as a stellar list of contacts. He employed underhanded tactics to win debates, and he constantly aggrandized his own achievements. Personality-wise, you could think of him as the Donald Trump of Ancient Rome.

The faux university also did not have professors, not even part-time adjunct professors, and the “faculty” (as they were called) were certainly not “the best of the best.” They were commissioned sales people, many with no experience in real estate. One managed a fast food joint, as Senator Marco Rubio would point out during the March 3 Republican primary debate in 2016. Two other instructors were in personal bankruptcy while collecting fees from would-be Trump University graduates eager to learn how to get rich. Trump

The debates we have about gay marriage, transgender bathroom rights, immigration, whether it’s “all lives matter” or “black lives matter” have been largely settled in the social world of our youth and they are looking at us dismayed and perplexed at why we just don’t get it. In the days after the election of Donald Trump, my older son and a few hundred of his classmates walked out of class and marched to city hall. They were angry and frightened. They had been working so hard to build a better, more inclusive world, and we adults had just royally fucked it up for them. My son sent me video of the protest and I posted it online. Quite a few adults commented: “Shouldn’t these kids be learning instead of protesting?” But they had been learning, far more than we apparently had, and that was why they were protesting.

we rely upon the voting populace to determine if a candidate’s intellectual abilities “measure up,” an inherently flawed system, as the populace has access only to prepackaged presentations and observations of a candidate in debates and while he or she is giving speeches—hardly an adequate database for accurately gauging intellectual ability.

Bannon didn’t promote internal debate, provide policy rationale, or deliver PowerPoint presentations; instead, he was the equivalent of Trump’s personal talk radio. Trump could turn him on at any moment, and it pleased him that Bannon’s pronouncements and views would consistently be fully formed and ever available, a bracing, unified-field narrative

Humility, on the other hand, is always centered on the cross of Jesus Christ, a political act that ushered in a new kind of political entity—the kingdom of God. Humility thus requires listening, debate, conversation, and dialogue that respects the dignity of all of God’s human creation. What would it take to replace the pursuit of power with humility?

Truth is a cornerstone of our democracy. As the former acting attorney general Sally Yates has observed, truth is one of the things that separates us from an autocracy: “We can debate policies and issues, and we should. But those debates must be based on common facts rather than raw appeals to emotion and fear through polarizing rhetoric and fabrications. “Not only is there such a thing as objective truth, failing to tell the truth matters. We can’t control whether our public servants lie to us. But we can control whether we hold them accountable for those lies or whether, in either a state of exhaustion or to protect our own political objectives, we look the other way and normalize an indifference to truth.

What I found telling was what Trump and his team didn’t ask. They were about to lead a country that had been attacked by a foreign adversary, yet they had no questions about what the future Russian threat might be. Nor did they ask how the United States might prepare itself to meet that threat. Instead, with the four of us still in our seats—including two outgoing Obama appointees—the president-elect and his team shifted immediately into a strategy session about messaging on Russia. About how they could spin what we’d just told them. Speaking as if we weren’t there, Priebus began describing what a press statement about this meeting might look like. The Trump team—led by Priebus, with Pence, Spicer, and Trump jumping in—debated how to position these findings for maximum political advantage. They were keen to emphasize that there was no impact on the vote, meaning that the Russians hadn’t elected Trump. Clapper interjected to remind them of what he had said about sixty seconds earlier: the intelligence community did not analyze American politics, and we had not offered a view on that.

On the field, priorities suddenly become crystal clear. Lostness stares me in the face, hems me in all about. Issues are black and white, life and death. How many of our church squabbles, debates of theology, and worries about politics could be set aside by getting our eyes back on the lost masses? The priority of their eternal destiny trumps all these lesser things.

Greek verse says that even the gods cannot change the past. But is this true? He made it to be as if, from the beginning, I had known that Psyche’s lover was a god, and as if all my doubtings, fears, guessings, debatings, questionings of Bardia, questionings of the Fox, all the rummage and business of it, had been trumped-up foolery, dust blown in my own eyes by myself. You, who read my book, judge. Was it so?

I've won each and every game that I've played. Won every opinion I've ever conveyed. Won every debate, no matter the topic. I once had a tie--I felt philanthropic." Making a deal? It has no superior! Building a wall? The rest are inferior. "My wall will be numero uno primero. I'll pay for it using another's dinero." And there is the crux of the Americus Trumpus: The swagger, the boasting, the oversized rump-us.

Museums alone cannot ease the tensions that come from the debates surrounding the fluidity of national identity in the twenty-first century. Nor can any cultural institution solve the problems of poverty, racial injustice, and police violence. But museums can contribute to understanding by creating spaces where debates are spirited but reasoned. Where contemporary challenges are addressed through contextualization and education.

And yet the debate was highly informative—if you turned the sound off. The event was broadcast with a split screen so that each presidential candidate was visible while the other candidate was talking. The talk was insipid, but the expressions on the candidates’ faces were fascinating. Trump was serious of mien. He concentrated intently on what Hillary was saying. Sometimes there was a little twitch of annoyance; sometimes, a small frown of disagreement. But mostly he looked deeply thoughtful. (Where he got that look is anyone’s guess. Maybe he purchased it at the same strange haberdashery where Hillary buys her Hillary costume.) Clinton is supposed to be the one with the deep thoughts. But there she was thoughtlessly making rude grimaces whenever Trump was speaking. Mom always said, “You shouldn’t make faces—your face may get stuck that way.” Hillary’s face got stuck that way. She spent the whole evening with a wipe-that-look-off-your-face look on her face. She

In academia, the ‘cultural turn’ saw a radical shift in scholarship whereby universities made culture the focus of contemporary debates. It also meant a shift in emphasis toward meaning and away from a positivist epistemology of discerning objective truth. Despite attempts to use the anti-postmodern language of real conservatives at times, Milo and his 4chan troll fans are in many ways the perfect postmodern offspring, where every statement is wrapped in layers of faux-irony, playfulness and multiple cultural nods and references.

The pro-life movement pledged its support, however reluctantly. In return it got a leader who put up a better fight during debates against abortion than any other presidential nominee in history. In the final debate against Hillary Clinton, Trump left her struggling to respond when he said of her opposition to any restriction on abortion, “Well, I think it’s terrible. If you go with what Hillary is saying, in the ninth month, you can take the baby and rip the baby out of the womb of the mother just prior to the birth of the baby.”33

Neither Trump nor his Russian backers spent very much money during the campaign. Television did the advertising for them free of charge. Even the Twitter accounts of MSNBC, CNN, CBS, and NBC mentioned Trump twice as often as they mentioned Clinton. When Russia began to release hacked emails, the networks and the media played along. Russia thus influenced the headlines and even the questions posed in the presidential debates. Content from hacked emails figured in two of the three debates; in the final one, the debate moderator accepted an erroneous Russian recasting of Clinton’s words in a speech, and made of it a central issue.

Populists of the Trump variety and the Sanders variety (who are not in fact as different as they seem) are not wrong to see these corporate cosmopolitans as members of a separate, distinct, and thriving class with economic and social interests of its own. Those interests overlap only incidentally and occasionally with those of movement conservatives — and overlap even less as the new nationalist-populist strain in the Republican party comes to dominate the debate on questions such as trade and immigration. Under attack from both the right and the left, free enterprise and free trade increasingly are ideas without a party. As William H. Whyte discovered back in 1956, the capitalists are not prepared to offer an intellectual defense of capitalism or of classical liberalism. They believe in something else: the managers’ dream of command and control.

But male politicians don’t have to escape to all-male safe spaces to sideline women. There are a variety of manoeuvres they can and do employ to undercut their female colleagues in mixed-gender settings. Interrupting is one: ‘females are the more interrupted gender,’ concluded a 2015 study that found that men were on average more than twice as likely to interrupt women as women were to interrupt men. During a televised ninety-minute debate in the run-up to the 2016 US presidential election, Donald Trump interrupted Hillary Clinton fifty-one times, while she interrupted him seventeen times. And it wasn’t just Trump: journalist Matt Lauer (since sacked after multiple allegations of sexual harassment) was also found to have interrupted Clinton more often than he interrupted Trump. He also ‘questioned her statements more often’, although Clinton was found to be the most honest candidate running in the 2018 election.

Donald Trump is rape culture's blathering id, and just a few days after the Access Hollywood tape dropped, then Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton (who, no doubt, has just as many man-made scars as the rest of us) was required to stand next to him on a stage for a presidential debate and remain unflappable while being held to an astronomically higher standard and pretend that he was her equal while his followers persisted in howling that sexism is a feminist myth. While Trump bragged about sexual assault and vowed to suppress disobedient media, cable news pundits spent their time taking a protractor to Clinton's smile - a constant, churning microanalysis of nothing, a subtle subversion of democracy that they are poised to repeat in 2020. And then she lost. (Actually, in a particularly painful living metaphor, she won, but because of institutional peculiarities put in place by long-dead white men, they took it from her and gave it to the man with fewer votes.

I really think that if we don’t start caring about whether people tell the truth or not, it’s going to be literally impossible to restore anything approaching a reasonable political discourse. Politicians have always shaded the truth. But if you can say something that is provably false, and no one cares, then you can’t have a real debate about anything. I firmly believe that you can draw a straight line from Rush Limbaugh through Fox News through present-day websites like Breitbart and the explosion in “fake news”* that played such a big role in the 2016 campaign. And that’s how someone like Trump can wind up in the Oval Office. I know I’m sort of farting into the wind on this. But I hope you’ll fart along with me. I’ve always believed that it’s possible to discern true statements from false statements, and that it’s critically important to do so, and that we put our entire democratic experiment in peril when we don’t. It’s a lesson I fear our nation is about to learn the hard way.

Through the fall, the president’s anger seemed difficult to contain. He threatened North Korea with “fire and fury,” then followed up with a threat to “totally destroy” the country. When neo-Nazis and white supremacists held a rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and one of them killed a protester and injured a score of others, he made a brutally offensive statement condemning violence “on many sides … on many sides”—as if there was moral equivalence between those who were fomenting racial hatred and violence and those who were opposing it. He retweeted anti-Muslim propaganda that had been posted by a convicted criminal leader of a British far-right organization. Then as now, the president’s heedless bullying and intolerance of variance—intolerance of any perception not his own—has been nurturing a strain of insanity in public dialogue that has been long in development, a pathology that became only more virulent when it migrated to the internet. A person such as the president can on impulse and with minimal effort inject any sort of falsehood into public conversation through digital media and call his own lie a correction of “fake news.” There are so many news outlets now, and the competition for clicks is so intense, that any sufficiently outrageous statement made online by anyone with even the faintest patina of authority, and sometimes even without it, will be talked about, shared, and reported on, regardless of whether it has a basis in fact. How do you progress as a culture if you set out to destroy any common agreement as to what constitutes a fact? You can’t have conversations. You can’t have debates. You can’t come to conclusions. At the same time, calling out the transgressor has a way of giving more oxygen to the lie. Now it’s a news story, and the lie is being mentioned not just in some website that publishes unattributable gossip but in every reputable newspaper in the country. I have not been looking to start a personal fight with the president. When somebody insults your wife, your instinctive reaction is to want to lash out in response. When you are the acting director, or deputy director, of the FBI, and the person doing the insulting is the chief executive of the United States, your options have guardrails. I read the president’s tweets, but I had an organization to run. A country to help protect. I had to remain independent, neutral, professional, positive, on target. I had to compartmentalize my emotions. Crises taught me how to compartmentalize. Example: the Boston Marathon bombing—watching the video evidence, reviewing videos again and again of people dying, people being mutilated and maimed. I had the primal human response that anyone would have. But I know how to build walls around that response and had to build them then in order to stay focused on finding the bombers. Compared to experiences like that one, getting tweeted about by Donald Trump does not count as a crisis. I do not even know how to think about the fact that the person with time on his hands to tweet about me and my wife is the president of the United States.

Meanwhile, the US House of Representatives voted in favor of a military budget even bigger than Trump had asked for. And, as Erik Sherman at Forbes magazine eloquently pointed out, 60 percent of the Democrats voted for this outsized military budget which totals $695.5 billion. As Sherman explains, "{i}n other words, of the party that supposedly opposes rampant military spending and the Trump administration, 60% voted for this bill," at a time "{w}hen income inequality combines with systemic and systematic redistribution of virtually all income growth to the wealthiest while their taxes are reduced." Sherman of course hints at a truth which must be accepted- that Democrats are not, and never really have been, a party which "opposes rampant military spending." There is a bi-partisan consensus on such spending, and there is very little debate on lowering it. And this is for a number of reasons, one of which being that military spending is very lucrative for the arms manufacturers who bilk the quite willing Pentagon, and by extension the taxpayers; indeed, these are the biggest welfare cheats who few will acknowledge.

opportunities inherent in the logic of the system. The American system of government has never separated money from political power, and in the two decades before Trump’s election, the role of money in American politics had grown manifold. Elections are decided by money: unlike in many other democracies, where electoral campaigns last from several weeks to a few months, are financed by government grants and/or subjected to strict spending limits—in the United States, it is contributions from the private sector that allow campaigns to exist in the first place. National and state party machines reinforce this system by apportioning access to public debates on the basis of the amount of money a candidate has secured. Access to media, which is to say, access to voters, also costs money: where in many democracies media are bound by obligations to provide airtime to candidates, in America the primary vehicle for addressing voters is through paid advertisements. No one in the political mainstream seemed to think anything was wrong with the marriage of money and politics. Former elected officials went to work as lobbyists. Using campaign contributions and lobbying to create (or kill) laws was normal. Power begat more money, and money begat more power. We could call the system that preceded and precipitated Trump’s rise an oligarchy, and we would be right.

Trump has called the media ‘enemies of the people’.59 This is central to Trump’s approach to politics: whether a deliberate strategy or the result of lifelong habit, Trump has no respect for the idea of the fourth estate, a media holding power to account. Everything must be a row, not a debate – the media aren’t checking his claims, or his details; they’re standing against him and his supporters. Trump’s style of politics needs an enemy, and with Clinton dispatched in the presidential election, the media are the perfect choice for the role.

He insinuated that, unlike all previous candidates, he might not accept as legitimate a clear win by his opponent. At the final presidential debate on October 19, when asked by moderator Chris Wallace if he would honor the election results, Trump responded, “I’ll keep you in suspense, okay?” At a rally the following day, he said, “I will totally accept the results of this great and historic presidential election—if I win.” On October 27, he told the crowd at a rally, “And just thinking to myself right now, we should just cancel the election and just give it to Trump, right? What are we even having it for?

To be clear: Racial epithets; slurs based on gender, sexuality, or ethnicity; and other personal attacks and denigrations have no place in civil society or discourse. However, Baer is suggesting that we should put in place what the U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly called prior restraints on free speech. Baer’s pseudosophisticated model applied at our nation’s colleges and universities would result in regular censorship. This is dangerous because students are supposed to learn to debate and overcome bad ideas with words, facts, and reason rather than violence, censorship, or government suppression. In fact, this is exactly what happened when Charles Murray tried to speak at Middlebury College in Vermont in March 2017.13 Rather than listen to his arguments and debate him, students attacked Murray and another professor. After successfully disrupting a planned speech by Murray, the students tracked Murray and a professor down to where they had fled and assaulted them. The professor, Allison Stranger, was ultimately hospitalized. Applying Baer’s model to society at-large would bring about a system of government-led speech oppression that would place the United States in the company of China, Russia, and North Korea.

First, he’s a billionaire, and a seventy-year-old man. Meaning, he doesn’t give a rat’s ass anymore about anything other than what matters. He’s lived a wild life already—so he doesn’t care who his casual comments offend. When he makes a joke it’s like when a baby farts. It’s nothing personal, the baby’s forgotten it, while everyone is choking out in the room. But the baby doesn’t care. I also had to admit that he’s never been in public office, so he doesn’t know how to be that particular kind of phony. I mean the phony that we all accept—which I call the “mandatory fake.” The mandatory fake is the married news anchor who condemns unseemly sexual behavior while banging Dalmatians in a nearby hotel. Being an old rich uncle who’s never been in politics, Trump has no familiarity with mandatory fake. There is, however, a different kind of fakery in Trump’s world of real estate fibbery. But such lies—salesman’s lies—are deliberately obvious by their excess. You know a salesman is lying when he tells you the car you’re buying from him was only driven by a little old lady once a week to church, which is great because she lives in the attic above the church! A salesman’s lie is done with a wink and an exaggeration (“This is the biggest crowd ever!”). A politician’s lie is a promise that could very well be true, but never is (“Read my lips, no new taxes”). You see the difference? Trump’s lies are common and do not insult us, because he assumes we’re all in on the joke. Politicians are daring you to go against your own innate skepticism (which is always a mistake). Am I “Trump-splaining”? Yes, I am. For now that he’s our president and up against so much, it’s no longer fealty to do so. It’s actually fairness. Anyway, as a Holmes, I’ve since reevaluated some positions that I’ve taken for granted. I’ve looked at the research on illegal immigration and its effects on unemployment. I’ve also looked harder at crime numbers, legal vs. illegal offenders. I’ve pretty much stuck to my original precepts, but I realize that ideology ultimately helps no one in that debate.

Trump is hardly the first president to promise a crackdown on illegal immigration. But he has tried to erase the political distinction between illegal and legal immigration, the former in the interest of law and order and the latter in the interest of national security. Of course, reality is very different than the one Trump portrays. He dismisses the socio-economic importance of immigration, keeping our working population younger as the baby boomers retire. And he ignores the push and pull behind global migration. The push relates to the disintegration of fragile countries due to conflict and climate change. The pull involves the unmet need for low skill work within the United States at a time of effective full employment, which existing immigration quotas can’t meet due to political paralysis. Given the political polarization, the parties talk past one another. Calls for comprehensive immigration reform are blunted by accusations of amnesty. Thus, there is no reasoned debate and little room for compromise.

Michael Barbaro and I spent all afternoon calling women voters. We declared that women watched the debate “through the same inescapable prism: a raunchy, three-minute recording in which Mr. Trump told of kissing and touching women however he pleased.” We called this “Trump’s new, agonizing and self-created reality” and declared his campaign “imperiled by his careless approach to gender . . .” Less than a month later, Trump would win a majority of white women.

Strangely enough, the least presidential moments of the visit persuaded some of the Post’s editors that Trump wasn’t putting on an act for them. Fred Hiatt, the paper’s editorial-page editor, had to ask, How could a man running for president justify going on a nationally televised debate and talking about the size of his penis?

With a bit more hindsight, I think Trump was bothered by me not necessarily because I’m a woman but because I’m a woman with power. I had the 9:00 p.m. show on Fox News, his favorite channel, and I couldn’t be brought to heel. I think he believed I could help or hurt him more than Anderson Cooper or Chuck Todd (both of whom also covered Trump with skepticism), or just about anyone else in the media. That’s why he repeatedly demanded a boycott. And wanted me pulled from future debates. And his supporters petitioned to have me fired. They wanted to remove me from power. People

When a reporter reached him to ask what the campaign was planning for the next evening’s debate against Clinton, and whether a show of contrition might be warranted, Bannon didn’t miss a beat: “Attack, attack, attack, attack, attack.

He and Kushner had hit upon the plan after seeing Mark Cuban, the billionaire owner of the Dallas Mavericks and an outspoken Clinton partisan, seated in the front row during the first debate on September 26. Trump personally approved the idea, understanding that it would create an indelible moment of TV drama: the candidates’ family members were to enter the debate hall at the same time and shake hands, which would put Bill Clinton face-to-face with his accusers.

Within minutes of the debate’s end, even as Trump was still nursing his grievances on live television, reporters began to realize that the revelations of his past behavior, so bluntly excavated by Kelly, had indeed caused an intense reaction among Republican voters—not against Trump, but against Fox News.

On television and on the front pages of the major newspapers, Trump clearly seemed to be losing the election. Each new woman who came forward with charges of misbehavior became a focal point of coverage, coupled with Trump’s furious reaction, his ever darkening speeches, and the accompanying suggestion that they were dog whistles aimed at racists and anti-Semites. “Trump’s remarks,” one Washington Post story explained, summing up the media’s outlook, “were laced with the kind of global conspiracies and invective common in the writings of the alternative-right, white-nationalist activists who see him as their champion. Some critics also heard echoes of historical anti-Semitic slurs in Trump’s allegations that Clinton ‘meets in secret with international banks to plot the destruction of U.S. sovereignty’ and that media and financial elites were part of a soulless cabal.” This outlook, which Clinton’s campaign shared, gave little consideration to the possibility that voters might be angry at large banks, international organizations, and media and financial elites for reasons other than their basest prejudices. This was the axis on which Bannon’s nationalist politics hinged: the belief that, as Marine Le Pen put it, “the dividing line is [no longer] between left and right but globalists and patriots.” Even as he lashed out at his accusers and threatened to jail Clinton, Trump’s late-campaign speeches put his own stamp on this idea. As he told one rally: “There is no global anthem, no global currency, no certificate of global citizenship. From now on, it’s going to be ‘America first.’” Anyone steeped in Guénon’s Traditionalism would recognize the terrifying specter Trump conjured of marauding immigrants, Muslim terrorists, and the collapse of national sovereignty and identity as the descent of a Dark Age—the Kali Yuga. For the millions who were not familiar with it, Trump’s apocalyptic speeches came across as a particularly forceful expression of his conviction that he understood their deep dissatisfaction with the political status quo and could bring about a rapid renewal. Whether it was a result of Trump’s apocalyptic turn, disgust at the Clintons, or simply accuser fatigue—it was likely a combination of all three—the pattern of slippage in the wake of negative news was less pronounced in Trump’s internal surveys in mid-October. Overall, he still trailed. But the data were noisy. In some states (Indiana, New Hampshire, Arizona) his support eroded, but in others (Florida, Ohio, Michigan) it actually improved. When Trump held his own at the third and final debate on October 19, the numbers inched up further. The movement was clear enough that Nate Silver and other statistical mavens began to take note of it. “Is the Presidential Race Tightening?” he asked in the title of an October 26 article. Citing Trump’s rising favorability numbers among Republicans and red-state trend lines, he cautiously concluded that probably it was. By November 1, he had no doubt. “Yes, Donald Trump Has a Path to Victory” read the headline for his column that day, in which he

Donald Trump, whose signature contribution to political debate had been his relentless propagation of the lie that Barack Obama is not an American citizen, ran the most racist presidential campaign since the arch-segregationist George Wallace’s 1968 bid. While

Within minutes of the debate’s end, even as Trump was still nursing his grievances on live television, reporters began to realize that the revelations of his past behavior, so bluntly excavated by Kelly, had indeed caused an intense reaction among Republican voters—not against Trump, but against Fox News. One

Hillary’s America was met with outrage on the Left, but no one could rebut a single fact in the book or movie. Even my most incriminating allegations proved invulnerable. I noted that, in 1860, the year before the Civil War, no Republican owned a slave; all the four million slaves at the time were owned by Democrats. Now this generalization could easily be refuted by someone providing a list of Republicans who owned slaves. The Left couldn’t do it. One assiduous researcher finally sought to dispute me with a single counterexample. Ulysses S. Grant, he pointed out, once inherited a slave from his wife’s family. I conceded the point but reminded him that, at the time, Ulysses S. Grant was not a Republican. Fearful that they had no substantive answer to Hillary’s America, the mainstream media went into complete denial. If you watched the major networks or public television, or listened to National Public Radio, you would have no idea that Hillary’s America even existed. The book was Number One on the New York Times bestseller list and the movie was the top-grossing documentary of the year. Both were dense with material directly relevant to the ongoing election debate. Yet they were completely ignored by a press that was squarely in the Hillary camp. Despite the failed fulminations and widespread denial, however, the book and movie had an effect. Many people credit it with motivating Republicans and persuading undecideds and thus helping Trump get to the White House. I have no idea how to measure this effect. I do know my book and film helped shape the election narrative. They helped expose Hillary as a gangster and the Democrats as her accomplices with a long history of bigotry and exploitation to account for. In the 2016 election, for the first time the Democrats could not drop the race bomb and get away with it.

You’ve got to give it to Trump—he’s hateful, but it’s hard to look away from him. He uses his size to project power: he looms over the podium, gets in interviewers’ faces, glowers, threatens to punch people. I watched a video of one of our debates with the sound off and discovered that, between his theatrical arm waving and face making and his sheer size and aggressiveness, I watched him a lot more than I watched me.

It was the second presidential debate, and Donald Trump was looming behind me. Two days before, the world heard him brag about groping women. Now we were on a small stage, and no matter where I walked, he followed me closely, staring at me, making faces. It was incredibly uncomfortable. He was literally breathing down my neck. My skin crawled.

it. I was lucky to have something few others do: relationships with American designers who helped me find outfits I could wear from place to place, in all climates. Ralph Lauren’s team made the white suit I wore to accept the nomination and the red, white, and blue suits I wore to debate Trump three times. More than a dozen American designers made T-shirts to support my campaign and even held an event during New York Fashion Week to show them off.

He knew who his audience was going to be—it was not going to be people who want to have policy debates. It was going to be older people, people who work with their hands.

When you look back at his interviews, you can see how they helped him prepare for the debates, both in the primary and the general election. It was political genius and a talent for which he gets very little credit. If anyone but Donald J. Trump showed the same skill, he or she would be called a mastermind.

Israeli national identity oscillates between the poles of the Holocaust and the Six-Day War, victim and vanquisher - the latter is the antidote too the former. Permanently vulnerable, Israel must respond to any attack with massive force. For a nation with genocide as a central political referent, security is paramount, and it trumps all other considerations. "Never again!" puts Israel's militaristic policy choices into a place beyond debate.

The debate of August 6, 2015 was held in Cleveland, Ohio, and broadcast on Fox News and Facebook. It was the first debate and the most anticipated question that loomed was how Trump would perform. He’d never participated in a formal debate before, making him a neophyte up against practiced and supposedly ruthless opposition. The world had no idea what was coming, and neither did the deer-in-the-headlights Republicans who were helpless to counter the sheer aggressive force of Donald Trump.

A pessimistic orientation does not seek accommodations with the system. We share the goal of the undercommons, which “is not to end the troubles but to end the world that created those particular troubles as the ones that must be opposed” (Halberstam 2013, 9). Moten and Harney don’t play the liberal game of reform; they are constantly reframing the problems at hand. What questions we ask are crucial—for bad questions yield worse answers, ones that compound the problem. On prison abolition, their intervention is decisive and reconfigures the coordinates of the debate: for them, it is “not so much the abolition of prisons but the abolition of a society that could have prisons, that could have slavery” (Moten and Harney 2013, 42). How do you abolish a society? How do you fight state power? Is anti-statism, ethical (that is, nonviolent) anarchism, the only solution? Is it a solution? Or do you dare to seize power, as with the example of Morales? A universal politics takes these questions to heart. For this reason, its skeptical negativity is put into the service of a more virtuous end: locating antagonisms, rather than settling for conflicts or pseudo-struggles. Its challenge is to sustain the antagonistic logic of class struggle, and avoid the comfort of static oppositions. The cultural Left has its enemies (Trump, Putin, Le Pen, Erdoğan, Modi, Duterte, Netanyahu, Orbán, Bolsonaro, Suu Kyi, MBS, etc.)—and, conversely, notorious leaders blame liberal media, demonizing bad press with the “enemy of the people” charge—but nothing really changes; the basic features or coordinates of the current society remain the same. Worse, the liberal capitalist system is legitimized (only in a free democracy can you, as a citizen, criticize tyrants abroad and, more importantly, express your outrage at the president, politicians, or state power without the fear of retribution) and the cultural Left is tacitly compensated for playing by the rules—for practicing non-antagonistic politics, for forgoing class insurgency and not engaging in class war (Žižek 2020f)—rewarded with “libidinal profit” (Žižek 1997b, 47), with what Lacan calls a “surplus-enjoyment” (2007, 147), an enjoyment-in-sacrifice. That is to say, cultural leftists, with their “Beautiful Souls” intact, enjoy not being a racist, a misogynist, a transphobe, an ableist, and so on. Hating the haters, the morally repulsive, the fascists of the world, is indeed an endless source of libidinal satisfaction for “woke” liberals. But what changes does it actually produce?

don’t just negate the other person’s claims; reframe. The facts unframed will not set you free. You cannot win just by stating the true facts and showing that they contradict your opponent’s claims. Frames trump facts.

So there was good reason that very powerful potentates of the medical cartel were already targeting HCQ long before President Trump began his infamous romance with the malaria remedy. President Trump’s endorsement of HCQ on March 19, 20207 hyper-politicized the debate and gave Dr. Fauci’s defamation campaign against HCQ a soft landing among Democrats and the media. Trump’s critics relegated any further claims of HCQ efficacy to the same anti-science waste bin as Trump’s notorious recommendation for bleach to cure COVID and his denial of climate change. But HCQ had a long history of safe medical use that got lost in the politics and propaganda.

Pete, to his credit, would respond to Rush at a Las Vegas town hall in a viral moment: The idea of the likes of Rush Limbaugh or Donald Trump lecturing anybody on family values. I mean, I’m sorry, but one thing about my marriage is it’s never involved me having to send hush money to a porn star after cheating on my spouse, with him or her. So, if they want to debate family values, let’s debate family values, I’m ready.

Five days after the last debate, on October 21, 2016, Politico reported that Clinton’s secretive transition team had “hit the gas pedal,” hiring staff and culling through résumés, while quietly reaching out to key Democrats.96 At

The Donald has the political players rising on their hind legs in defense of their realm. And he has hitherto shattered the totems and taboos these players enforce. Debated as never before are vexations like immigration, Islam, and, yes, the legitimacy of the Republican National Committee.

Science” is often the trump card laid in debates about morality and public policy. When we ask, “Who or what is the fetus?” a biologist will say, “a human organism.” But science (at least when it is functioning within its proper boundaries) refuses to make judgments of moral value between human organisms at different stages or circumstances of life.

What interests me about Charness’s study, however, is that it moves beyond the 10,000-hour rule by asking not just how long people worked, but also what type of work they did. In more detail, they studied players who had all spent roughly the same amount of time—around 10,000 hours—playing chess. Some of these players had become grand masters while others remained at an intermediate level. Both groups had practiced the same amount of time, so the difference in their ability must depend on how they used these hours. It was these differences that Charness sought. In the 1990s, this was a relevant question. There was debate in the chess world at the time surrounding the best strategies for improving. One camp thought tournament play was crucial, as it provides practice with tight time limits and working through distractions. The other camp, however, emphasized serious study—pouring over books and using teachers to help identify and then eliminate weaknesses. When surveyed, the participants in Charness’s study thought tournament play was probably the right answer. The participants, as it turns out, were wrong. Hours spent in serious study of the game was not just the most important factor in predicting chess skill, it dominated the other factors. The researchers discovered that the players who became grand masters spent five times more hours dedicated to serious study than those who plateaued at an intermediate level. The grand masters, on average, dedicated around 5,000 hours out of their 10,000 to serious study. The intermediate players, by contrast, dedicated only around 1,000 to this activity.

I was raised with strong values, and had spent much of my life to that point seeing my character tested. I was viciously bullied in middle school. My father died when I was a teenager. As a lawyer, I worked eighteen-hour days immersed in acrimony. As a cub reporter, I was targeted by a violent stalker. Once I became a well-known news anchor, I accepted without complaint the scrutiny that comes with that role. I’d also navigated my way through plenty of sexism from powerful men. So I suppose I was as prepared as anyone could be to spend the 2016 election being targeted by the likely Republican nominee. Yet still, the chaos Trump unleashed was of a completely different order than anything I’d encountered before—than anything any journalist has encountered at the hands of a presidential candidate in the history of modern American politics. This is the story of how I found myself on that debate stage, and how asking that question led to one of the toughest years of my life.

Several times a session—and we had twenty-one of them in the general—just as he had warned, Philippe-as-Trump would say something so outlandish, none of us could quite believe it. Then he’d tell us it was almost verbatim from a Trump rally, interview, or primary debate.

Trump wouldn’t answer any question directly. He was rarely linear in his thinking or speaking. He digressed into nonsense and then digressed even more. There was no point in refuting his arguments like it was a normal debate – it was almost impossible to identify what his arguments even were, especially since they changed minute to minute.

The candidates promised to cut taxes for those in the highest brackets, preserve Wall Street loopholes, tolerate the off-shoring of manufacturing jobs and profits, and downgrade or privatize middle-class entitlement programs, including Social Security. Free trade was barely debated. These positions faithfully reflected the agenda of the wealthy donors, but studies showed that they were increasingly out of step with the broad base of not just Democratic but also Republican voters, many of whom had been left behind economically and socially for decades, particularly acutely since the 2008 financial crash. Trump, who could afford to forgo the billionaires’ backing and ignore their policy priorities, saw the opening and seized it.

As I stood up to walk to the spin room I saw that it was different for this debate. We were surrounded by gossip columnists. I was interviewed by a reporter from Inside Edition. The campaign had become a reality television show.

After several rounds of burgers, the “debate prep” portion of the program finally started and consisted almost entirely of Roger Ailes telling war stories of prepping Ronald Reagan and George H. W. for debates. He said nothing of any substance that might help Trump in September against Hillary. Bannon was beside himself. He’d come all the way out to God-knew-where New Jersey for a cookout and war stories. Then, just when things couldn’t get any stranger, Paul Manafort appeared, dressed in boat shoes, white capri pants with string ties, and a blue blazer complete with a crest on the breast pocket. Thurston Howell III, Bannon thought.

Soon after the campaign hired Manafort, his budget quickly cut successive checks totaling over $700,000 to a newly formed Delaware company that was supposed to provide direct mail to Nebraska and Indiana. Whether or not the mailing found its way to those states, or to any other location, is still up for debate. What is known is that Left Hand LLC had a mailing address at a farm in Virginia that just happened to be the voting residence of Manafort’s former business partner.

During the debates, Jared’s assistant, Avi Berkowitz, a Harvard Law grad ran what we called Trump Tower Live, a live-feed Facebook talk show that we posted pre- and postdebate.

A FEW WEEKS before the first presidential debate at Hofstra University on Long Island, Mark Cuban, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks who appears on Shark Tank, went on Fox Business and said that a Trump victory in November would cause the stock market to crash.

Bannon and the Breitbart editors had the same reaction and immediately turned on Megyn Kelly, with a fusillade of negative articles. She became the newest Breitbart narrative: the back-stabbing, self-promoting betrayer-of-the-cause. And Breitbart became the locus of pro-Trump, anti-Fox conservative anger. Between Thursday night, when the debate took place, and Sunday evening, Breitbart published twenty-five stories on Kelly, and the site’s editor in chief, Alex Marlow, went on CNN to accuse Fox News of “trying to take out Donald Trump” and staging “a gotcha debate.” The intensity of Republican anger stunned Fox News executives. The debate had drawn a record 24 million viewers. Now many of them were apoplectic at the network’s top talent. “In the beginning, virtually 100 percent of the emails were against Megyn Kelly,” a Fox source told New York’s Gabriel Sherman. “Roger was not happy. Most of the Fox viewers were taking Trump’s side.” Word spread through the building that Kelly was furious and had personally complained to Ailes. By Sunday, the attacks against her showed no sign of letting up, as other conservative opinion makers, such as radio host Mark Levin, agreed that her questions to Trump had been “unfair.” In a panic, Ailes called Bannon and begged him to call off the attacks. “Steve, this isn’t fair, and it’s killing us,” Ailes said. “You have to stop it.” “Fuck that, that was outrageous what she did!” Bannon retorted. “She pulled every trick out of the leftist playbook.” “You’ve gotta knock this crap off, Steve.” “Not until she backs off Trump—she’s still going after him on her show.” “She’s the star of this network! Cut it out!” The call ended without resolution. Bannon and Ailes would not speak again for almost a year.

But it would be a tendentious argument, they believed, not one an experienced prosecutor would take to a real court with a real jury. The only meaningful debate was about the Trump Tower meeting—some prosecutors thought they did not need to make a big deal out of it since it turned out to be so inconsequential, while others argued that even if not criminal it was still a deeply troubling episode that belonged in their final report.

American democracy is backsliding in the twenty-first century. The root cause is the combination of three factors. First, political tribalism that enflames age-old cognitive biases. Second, brand-new social-media platforms that transform how people publish, consume, and process information. And third, long-entrenched structural deficiencies, like the two-party duopoly, that distort the US political system. The combination of these three components is a flywheel spinning faster and faster every day. Social media exacerbates tribalism by feeding users confirmatory and incendiary political news. The two-party political system compounds the resulting irrationality by pitting two juggernauts against each other in a bitter, all-consuming rivalry that stifles and deforms the marketplace of ideas. The polarized political debate, in turn, turbocharges over-stimulated tribal biases with partisan falsehoods (e.g., Trump colluded with Russia to hack the DNC’s email servers), gross caricatures (e.g., Hillary Clinton is a crooked felon), and abhorrent stupidities (e.g., Barack Obama was born in Kenya). And so the flywheel spins. This throbbing frenzy erodes respect for the Constitutional principles and essential traditions of American democracy examined in Part One—a respect that is necessary for them to function. Indeed, these principles and traditions aren’t laws of physics; they are rules for structuring society that require good faith, compromise, and broad consent to work. And they will eventually disintegrate if the American people continue to ignore them while fixating instead on short-term political battles.

Come to think of it, who really is Jesus’ dad? No one is mentioned on his birth certificate. In fact, he doesn’t have a birth certificate. Talk about a Birther conspiracy theory. Why isn’t Trump on the case? Obama has nothing on Jesus. Jesus isn’t American. He’s a Middle Eastern immigrant. Isn’t the Donald supposed to be stopping those cunts with their fanatical religious beliefs from getting into the country? Build the fucking Wall! Keep out Jesus.

Joe Biden himself, in a presidential debate, called them “an idea, not an organization.”[62] But that’s … not true. When I was in Philadelphia, it took me five minutes to google the local Antifa chapter’s website, where they were busily organizing to take pictures of people at Trump events and sending those pictures to the people’s employers, to get them fired for being white supremacists.

Meeting people whose life trajectories were so different from my own enlarged my way of thinking. Outside the school, arguments over refugees were raging, but the time I had spent inside this building showed me that those conversations were based on phantasms. People were debating their own fears. What I had witnessed taking place inside this school every day revealed the rhetoric for what it was: more propaganda than fact. Donald Trump appeared to believe his own assertions, but I hoped that in the years to come, more people would be able to recognize refugees for who they really were: simply the most vulnerable people on earth. Inside this school, where the reality of refugee resettlement was enacted every day, it was plain to see that seeking a new home took tremendous courage. And receiving those who had been displaced involved tremendous generosity. That’s what refugee resettlement was, I decided. Acts of courage met by acts of generosity. Despite how fear-based the national conversation had turned, there was nothing scary about what was happening at South. Getting to know the newcomer students had deepened my own life, and watching Mr. Williams work with all twenty-two of them at once with so much grace, dexterity, sensitivity, and affection had provided me with daily inspiration. I would even say that spending a year in room 142 had allowed me to witness something as close to holy as I’ve seen take place between human beings. I could only wish that in time, more people would be able to look past their fear of the stranger and experience the wonder of getting to know people from other parts of the globe. For as far as I could tell, the world was not going to stop producing refugees. The plain, irreducible fact of good people being made nomad by the millions through all the kinds of horror this world could produce seemed likely to prove the central moral challenge of our times. How did we want to meet that challenge? We could fill our hearts with fear or with hope. And the choice would affect more than just our own dispositions, for in choosing which seeds to sow, we would dictate the type of harvest. Surely the only harvest worth cultivating was the one Mr. Williams had been seeking: greater fluency, better understanding.

Dad swiftly learned that if he didn't put an opponent's character front and center, he often could find a way to change minds or work out a compromise. No one walks out of a meeting when you say, "I don't think you understand the ramifications of what you're doing, how people won't have access to things they need in their daily lives." That prompts debate. But if you tell an opponent, "You're just a mean-spirited jackass who's clearly prejudiced against people with disabilities"—well, if you're Jesse Helms, or anyone else for that matter, the conversation is over. That lesson, long a foundational one for my dad and our family, is one that too many politicians today have failed to pick up. The result is the toxic atmosphere that blew the door wide open for somebody like Trump, who has since turned that lesson on its head. Trump's motives can and should be questioned because, hell, most of the time he flat-out states them. And take my word, those motives ain't pretty.

In the second year of the Trump presidency, I attended a dinner of American hedge funders in Hong Kong. I was there as a guest speaker, to survey the usual assortment of global hot spots. A thematic question emerged from the group—was the “Pax Americana” over? There was a period of familiar cross-talk about whether Trump was a calamitous force unraveling the international order or merely an impolitic Republican politician advancing a conventional agenda. I kept interjecting that Trump was ushering in a new era—one of rising nationalist competition that could lead to war and unchecked climate change, to the implosion of American democracy and the accelerated rise of a China that would impose its own rules on the world. Finally, one of the men at the table interrupted with some frustration. He demanded a show of hands—how many around the table had voted for Trump, attracted by the promise of tax cuts and deregulation? After some hesitation, hand after hand went up, until I was looking at a majority of raised hands. The tally surprised me. Sure, I understood the allure of tax cuts and deregulation to a group like that. But these were also people who clearly understood the dangers that Trump posed to American democracy and international order. The experience suggested that even that ambiguous term “Pax Americana” was subordinate to the profit motive that informed seemingly every aspect of the American machinery. I’d come to know the term as a shorthand for America’s sprawling global influence, and how—on balance—the Pax Americana offered some stability amid political upheavals, some scaffolding around the private dramas of billions of individual lives. From the vantage point of these bankers, the Pax Americana protected their stake in international capital markets while allowing for enough risk—wars, coups, shifting energy markets, new technologies—so that they could place profitable bets on the direction of events. Trump was a bet. He’d make it easier for them to do their business and allow them to keep more of their winnings, but he was erratic and hired incompetent people—so much so that he might put the whole enterprise at risk. But it was a bet that enough Americans were willing to make, including those who knew better. From the perspective of financial markets, I had just finished eight years in middle management, as a security official doing his small part to keep the profit-generating ocean liner moving. The debates of seemingly enormous consequence—about the conduct of wars, the nature of national identity, and the fates of many millions of human beings—were incidental to the broader enterprise of wealth being created.

En la actualidad, la diferencia está en que el comercio internacional se ha desplazado al centro del debate político. Durante las recientes elecciones de Estados Unidos, los candidatos a la presidencia Bernie Sanders y Donald Trump hicieron de la oposición a los tratados comerciales una de las bases fundamentales de su campaña. Teniendo en cuenta el clima político del momento y a juzgar por el tono de los otros candidatos, defender la globalización equivalía a un suicidio electoral. La posterior victoria de Trump puede atribuirse, al menos en parte, a su línea dura en lo tocante al comercio y a su promesa de renegociar los tratados que, según él, beneficiaban a otras naciones a expensas de Estados Unidos.

Carlson could have offered a counterpoint instead of a polemic; he could have encouraged a debate. Instead he chose to lie about Yellen’s words. That made for more impact, more rage, not informed discussion. It was paradoxical, because just a few moments later, Carlson claimed “they,” the people in charge, “don’t want a debate.” When he worked at Heritage, he said, the idea was that “just because the other side was rotten didn’t mean you could be rotten.” But he had stopped applying that principle many, many years—and many, many rotten words—ago.

Winner Never Takes All If your approach to conflict has been to win at all costs, then that cost could be very high for you in the long run. We’ve all met them—the people who have to win the debate, trump the argument, and put down all opposition for the sheer enjoyment of being right. And just as we learn when we drive in traffic, you may have the right-of-way to make that left turn, but the guy speeding toward you may not care—and you end up with the honor of being dead right. Wow! How useful! Winning at all costs is a short-term and shortsighted strategy. Sure, you might win in the heat of battle, but you could leave a lot of carnage on the battlefield, and wounds that will never heal with some people.

A few minutes after 9 p.m., the concern turned to shock as Trump opened up with a calm, disciplined articulation of his plan to boost jobs, sprinkled with a toxic dose of Hillary as the status quo. This wasn’t the P. T. Barnum version of Donald Trump; it was the Ronald Reagan version. When Hillary interjected with a canned line, “I call it Trumped-up, trickle-down,” a collective groan echoed through the Democratic universe. Trump was fresh and on point. Hillary was a day-old bagel. He went in for the kill on trade, the issue that he hoped would deliver key Rust Belt states. “She’s been doing this for 30 years,” he charged. “And why hasn’t she made the agreements better?” And he called out NAFTA, the pact so singularly associated with her husband. Hillary was in quicksand. “I will bring back jobs; you can’t bring back jobs,” Trump said. Clean, simple, to the point. Hillary countered with the mother of all establishment talking points: “independent experts” agreed with her. This was a debacle, an Opposite Day of a debate in which a commanding Trump had Hillary on her heels and backpedaling fast.

There was another way to look at it: The debates served to reinforce the public perceptions of Hillary and Trump. She was more presidential, totally establishment, and super-rehearsed. He embodied change—for good and for ill. He could be genuine while lying; she came off as inauthentic even when she was telling the truth.

When Trump said, at the first debate, “If it weren’t for me, you wouldn’t even be talking about illegal immigration,” Carly Fiorina was not on the debate stage. She had waited until she bullied her way into the second debate to say, "Immigration did not come up in 2016 because Mr. Trump brought it up; we talked about it in 2012, we talked about it in 2008. We talked about it in 2004. We have been talking about it for 25 years. This is why people are tired of politicians.” She then proceeded to talk about it in the exact same way politicians have been talking about it for 25 years!

his comment was offensive and debating whether the female body does, indeed “try to shut the whole thing down.” We know this—we saw it happen with Trump and allegations of sexual assault, we saw it with Brett Kavanaugh and allegations of attempted rape.

Though most of our problems are systemic, most of our public debates are referendums on personality. Not many people can be neutral on the subject of Trump, so we wave him at you all day long. Meanwhile, a vast universe of systemic issues is ignored. We’ve been steadily narrowing that field of view for decades, particularly in investigative reporting.

Colmes was sent off to the Siberia of Fox News Radio in the weeks after Obama’s victory. Hannity was now the solo host. The pretense was going, going, gone: Hannity & Colmes had never been a fair fight, but at least it was a fight. Not anymore. The ascendance of a black president radicalized the network and ushered in an era with fewer left-right debates and more lectures. Hannity the star began to transform Hannity the show into what it is today—a nightly anti–Democratic Party attack ad for people who distrusted the nightly news.

The number one rule for any debate-prep team is to make sure the candidate isn’t hearing, seeing, or feeling anything for the first time when he or she steps into the ring with an opponent. Because Trump was liable to say or do just about anything, that was an even bigger focus for Hillary’s aides. Klain and Dunn had curated a database of all the questions that had ever been asked in general-election debates. “I don’t think she heard any questions for the first time,” said one participant who noted that a question Klain asked behind closed doors about a possible no-fly zone over Syria was repeated almost verbatim by moderator Chris Wallace in the third debate.

There is, in fact, a reason the subtitle of this book refers to “Trump haters” rather than “Trump critics.” Many thoughtful Americans, and many thoughtful political writers, have issues with our 45th president—myself included. But the critics have also worked to do that very hard thing of judging Trump via the same lens they have judged past presidents. They praise him when he gets things right. They criticize him when he gets things wrong. This is the usual and long-held method of political accountability. But the “haters” can’t abide nuance. To the Resistance, any praise—no matter how qualified—of Trump is tantamount to American betrayal. And by extension, any criticism of the Resistance is equally heretical. If you are a Trump hater, this is an excellent way of shutting down challenges to your tactics or arguments. But it’s a rotten way of furthering public debate, and the ensuing vacuum of meaningful discussion has already led the Resistance to overindulge. It is now engaging in behavior that is proving far more corrosive to our institutions and

Donald Trump has been accused of being a bigot; whether it is of conviction or convenience is debated.

So what sort of signal does it send when a man as intelligent and thoughtful as Bill Bennett decides to contradict his entire body of work to support a man like Donald Trump? What value is left in intelligent reasoning? Donald Trump didn’t crash the guardrails of political and civil standards; rather, the highway officials eagerly removed the guardrails and stood by cheering as the lunatic behind the wheel drove the party straight off the cliff of reason. When a Williams College and Harvard Law grad like Bill Bennett considers a man who found the nuclear triad a puzzling mystery in a primary debate qualified to be president, the idiotocracy is in full ascendant. John F. Kennedy once held a dinner for all the living Nobel Prize laureates at the White House. Donald Trump invited the CEO of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, to the White House so that he could complain about his Twitter account. Trump holds to a theory that there is some vast left-wing conspiracy in the tech world illuminati to personally slight him at every opportunity. But that’s just one of the many conspiracies that Trump embraces.

He lost the popular vote due to massive voter fraud. He agreed with Infowars’ Alex Jones that Hillary Clinton might have taken some form of drugs to enhance her debate performance and demanded, “I think we should take a drug test prior to the debate. I do.”24 Trump attacked his primary opponent Senator Ted Cruz by linking his father to the JFK assassination. He has said that a pillow was found on the Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia’s face and he might have been murdered. He’s sided with the anti-vaccine conspiracy nuts. Most famously, he laid the groundwork for his campaign for the Republican nomination by promising he could prove President Barack Obama was born in Africa. He’s claimed President Obama wore a ring with an Arabic inscription. He’s said global warming is a “hoax,” that windmills cause cancer.

14. He’s denied climate change. Then denied that he denied it.​​ Here’s Trump calling global warming a conspiracy created by the Chinese: The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive. @realDonaldTrump – 11:15 AM – 6 Nov 2012 More tweets of him calling global warming a hoax… NBC News just called it the great freeze – coldest weather in years. Is our country still spending money on the GLOBAL WARMING HOAX? @realDonaldTrump – 3:48 PM – 25 Jan 2014 This very expensive GLOBAL WARMING bullshit has got to stop. Our planet is freezing, record low temps,and our GW scientists are stuck in ice @realDonaldTrump – 4:39 PM – 1 Jan 2014 Ice storm rolls from Texas to Tennessee – I’m in Los Angeles and it’s freezing. Global warming is a total, and very expensive, hoax! @realDonaldTrump – 7:13 AM – 6 Dec 2013 Then, during a presidential debate with Hillary Clinton, Trump denied that he said any of this. Here’s the video. Clinton says, “Donald thinks that climate change is a hoax, perpetrated by the Chinese. I think it’s real.” Trump interrupts to say, “I do not say that. I do not say that.” Actually, Donald, you’ve said nothing else. Trump has also said, dozens of times in tweets like this, that global warming sounds like a great idea: It’s freezing and snowing in New York–we need global warming! @realDonaldTrump – 11:24 AM – 7 Nov 2012 Here he is hating wind turbines: It’s Friday. How many bald eagles did wind turbines kill today? They are an environmental & aesthetic disaster. @realDonaldTrump – 12:55 PM – 24 Aug 2012 Trump fought against a “really ugly” offshore wind farm in Scotland because it would mar the view from his Scottish golf resort. My new club on the Atlantic Ocean in Ireland will soon be one of the best in the World – and no-one will be looking into ugly wind turbines! @realDonaldTrump – 5:24 AM – 14 Feb 2014