Oh, Baby! It’s debate time:
Diaper Don is set up for a spanking
The hope is that the silly season in presidential politics might come to an end Monday night with the first debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. But that probably isn’t the way to bet, not after 15 months when the whole thing has been about as real as the reality television that made Trump a television star in this country.
Whatever happens this is the main event at long last, after all the name-calling and fabulism and outright lies from the Trump campaign, about everything from the invasion of Iraq to the definition of real sacrifice to the notion that Hillary Clinton is looking to abolish the Second Amendment, even to calling Lester Holt, the moderator of the first debate, a lousy Democrat. Maybe what we really find out at Hofstra is if the main event turns out to be nothing more than something out of pro wrestling: “Monday Night Raw.”
At least Trump gets the chance at Hofstra to stand up and tell the truth about an actual vision for the country, in front of the country and in front of the world; to finally stop acting as if he thinks he can win the presidency by doing standup.
Only this is what we got from him on Twitter over the weekend:
“If dopey Mark Cuban of failed Benefactor fame wants to sit in the front row, perhaps I will put Gennifer Flowers right alongside him!”
So that was still the level of discourse with the future of the country at stake six weeks from now, the Trump campaign actually having to deny on Sunday that Trump had invited Ms. Flowers, a woman who said she once had a sexual relationship with Bill Clinton. But the shot at Cuban was as predictable as phases of the moon. Cuban went at Trump. Trump went right back at him. This has been going on since he came down the escalator at Trump Tower and announced he was going to run for President.
It was treated like some kind of joke at the time. The joke turned out to be the people running against him for the Republican nomination, starting with Ted Cruz, who let Trump insult his wife and even suggest that Cruz’s father might have had some vague involvement in the assassination of John F. Kennedy, but now says he’s going to vote for Trump, anyway. It is just another example of the severe stomach problem that has plagued Cruz across his entire political life: No guts. But Cruz is long gone. Bernie, too. It is just Clinton and Trump on the stage, not talking at each other across social media or television commercials, but face to face. Trump says that he will treat her fairly as long as she treats him fairly. Right, after an entire season when he has called her a crooked liar on a daily basis.
We’re told by the fanboy pundits from the right that people don’t care about issues, or actual policy, that they don’t want to hear about any of that Monday night. They say that debates like this are never about issues or policy. It is one more lie from the presidential campaign of 20152016, as if the only thing that matters in this campaign, once and for all, is how things look, as if it is still 1960, when all people wanted to talk about with Kennedy vs. Nixon after the fact was how much sweating Richard Nixon did.
From the jump, Trump has talked about making America great again. But he has never properly explained when America was last great, at least in his eyes. Mostly, though, his reason for running has been this: I’m not her and I’m not them, “them” meaning any politician in Washington who isn’t with him, any politician who isn’t conspiring to rig the system, or maybe the election.
The great actor, James Cagney, a child of this city, used to joke that an old Hollywood boss, Jack Warner, used to call Cagney “a professional againster” when they were fighting about something. It is Trump who has now based his whole campaign on being a professional againster: Against the Clintons, and Barack Obama, and immigration, and Syrian refugees, even this country’s generals. He is against the notion of any kind of gun control, even as the mass shootings continue in America. He went up against a Gold Star family after the Democratic convention.
But after all the rallies, after the roar of the crowd that began last summer, after all the years on “The Apprentice” and “Celebrity Apprentice” and reveling in becoming the most famous man in the world, the only audience that matters is the one watching him go up against Hillary Clinton. Not his Facebook following, not nearly 12 million Twitter followers, certainly not his around-theclock pep squad at Fox News.
Trump has won the silly season, hands down, won it going away. But if it’s still the silly season on Monday night, the guy who calls everybody else losers loses big, no matter how loudly he declares victory when it’s over.