Day: September 25, 2016

Josh Marshall on the debate:

For Trump, the bigger problem in a debate setting is the nature of two person debates versus as many as ten on the stage at once. Answers in multi-person debates tend to be short and pointed. Time is in very short supply. Generally you have to fight to get in on a question. There can be back and forth and candidates are sometimes pressed on a given point. But that isn't the norm. Time is scarce and you can generally just hang back on a question you don't want to address. Two person debates have very different dynamics. I think the bigger liability for Trump is what we saw in the national security forum hosted a few weeks ago by NBC News. [....] [There, on a question regarding ISIS,] Trump has very little idea what he's talking about and when pressed on a clear contradiction he starts making up new nonsense to avoid addressing the question. As I said at the time: I think this exchange is pretty obvious for people in a way that transcends politics and ideology. Trump is the kid telling the teacher the dog ate his homework. Then the teacher points out he has no dog. But he's not going to apologize or come clean. He's just going to keep talking. Trump is extremely ignorant when it comes to public policy. George W. Bush had a pretty limited handle on public policy issues too. But either he or his campaign staff (likely both) had some awareness of this fact and kept his answers general and brief. Trump has no such self-awareness and generally just makes things up on the fly. That's seldom gone over well in non-Fox contexts - not just because he's ignorant but because it's usually pretty obvious he's just making things up. I do think it's possible he'll be goaded into saying something offensive or unhinged. For instance, I think it would be highly advisable for Clinton to confront Trump on birtherism - to press the point that he needs to provide some explanation and apology for why he spread this lie for six years. He's shown very little indication that he has a good answer to that question. Questions like that, shaming questions, tend to set him off.