If I felt like being overly generous to the collection of incompetents that the GOP put up against him I’d note that it’s probably easier to win a debate against him when it’s 1:1 and you don’t have to pretend you’re on the same side.
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Yet still a task that left an entire field of Republican candidates, career politicians, heck the Bush dynasty, all red faced and puffy and humiliated in the attempt.
Clinton made it look easy.
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Partly this is because she’s legitimately really good at this.
Other factors include:
- in the primary, his opponents waited months too long before taking him seriously
- A lot of the stuff she nailed him on might not have hurt him in the primary. Racism didn’t hurt him there at all. If they had raised the sexism, it might have helped, maybe?
- he didn’t have to speak nearly as much in the primary debates. Trump seems to be able to keep himself semi-functional for about half an hour.
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We could go back 40 years and put Hillary’s face on Roy Scheider’s head.
Smile, you son of a bitch!
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Who manipulated trump better? Hillary or Billy Bush?
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I thought this debate was Trump’s best chance… he had a friendly Fox debate moderator who was able to keep him from interrupting, I just don’t think Trump fully realized he was trying to help Trump try to come off as reasonable (for once)… but alas, even the moderator acting as part of his team right there on stage, trying to coax him into calmness couldn’t stop Trump for falling apart.
My question is whether this debate was part of the setup for the Trump campaign team’s new strategy… allow me to put on my tin foil hat first… there… that’s good…
So now Trump is threatening to sue if he feels the election is stolen from him. That’s fine, there’s a 4-4 split in SCOTUS. Oh, but wait, Trump brought up RBG’s comments about him. So, if she needs to recuse herself, we’ve not got a 4-3 SCOTUS…
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Thanks, Clinton.
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Clinton did it.
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I gotta wonder what exactly Trump was tearing up in that shot. I would guess “his victory speech” but I don’t think he’s that self-aware.
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Goading is easy when you’re dealing with a petulant and undisciplined child or, in this case, a 70-year-old case study in arrested development and narcissism. What takes a deft touch is goading him down the garden path, as it were, to a place where he’s not only rendered himself a fool in public but also (see the last gif @wrecksdart posted) realises if just for a moment that he’s out of his depth.
Clinton has that deft touch thanks to 30+ years in down-and-dirty politics and her experience as a diplomat (“diplomacy is the art of saying ‘nice doggie!’ while you look for a stick”), but skill alone isn’t enough; its deployment has to be motivated by a deep and cold hatred of preening bullies with an over-inflated self-regard (of which she’s had more than her share). That, in the end, is the main reason she was able to do what his primary opponents couldn’t.
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Not to take away from your point that Hillary’s debate performances were serious, and seriously impressive accomplishments, but to be fair, I doubt that very many of Trump’s primary supporters were swayed by these debates, or would have been swayed by similar debate strategies in the primaries.
What was great about her strategy was that she knew he would retreat back to what worked for him in the Republican debates, and she also knew that it wouldn’t play as well now that general election voters were paying attention. I think he knew it too, but was literally incapable of stopping himself once she had laid the bait.
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Hillary did it intentionally, but Billy wasn’t even trying. So… no, I don’t know who did it better. Something tells me goading Trump doesn’t exactly take a superhuman effort.
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Probably Rubio. He’s a nice young clean-cut ex-Mormon who can speak well enough assuming he’s properly hydrated. He can sufficiently gloss over the fact that he is really fucking abhorrent. People will vote for him.
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You make a good point. Her skill at goading an manipulating Trump was on full display, but the other masterclass she delivered was in not being manipulated or played by Trump. It’s not as obvious, but when you compare how Trump brought so many of his primary opponents down to his level (little Marco, etc) you can see how her experience of being under attack from raging jerks for literal years made her uniquely well qualified.
I wonder if Trey Gowdy even realises that he was nothing but debate prep for Clinton
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It’s true - I dislike the Clintons for lying / corruption reasons but she totally pwned him and was far more presidential than he can ever be.
Just imagine it’s Putin on the other side - Putin can lead Trump around by the nose (and knows it, which is why Russia loves Trump so much in this campaign) using the same techniques Hillary did. And also because Putin is a strong man (for good and bad), and Trump is a weak man pretending to be a strong one. Hillary showed herself to be a far stronger person than Trump.
One thing the article doesn’t give her credit for is just how deftly she dodged every awkward question about corruption. If you go back and look at the questions about, say, the huge contributions from terrible people to the Clinton Foundation or the Wikileaks dumps, she didn’t actually answer a single one, or try to. She turned the Clinton Foundation bribes into the mission of the Clinton Foundation, and the Wikileaks things she turned into Russia. The moderator tried to call her on it once or twice, then gave up when Trump didn’t have the intelligence to pursue those. Which in a way, is kind of Presidential. At least it’s someone who’s firmly in control.
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The impressive part was how she strung it out over three debates and kept the momentum going. She really had to have confidence in her knowledge of her opponent to attempt that risky move. It will serve her well when she has to go up against real sharks like Putin and Xi Jinping. What people like Clinton understand and what people like Donald will never understand is that doing one’s homework always gets one further than “going by your gut and winging it”.
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The effort comes from having enough self-control not to let him drag you down to his level. Most people in Hillary’s position would be screaming “YOU are seriously going to attack ME over sexual impropriety and assault? Are you fucking kidding??”
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Wow. This article couldn’t be more spot on. Bravo,
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