Summary: Donald Trump got pwned again Wednesday night by a woman! Indeed, The Donald managed to get himself pwned by easily the most skillful political operator currently active in the United States today with the possible exception of Barack Obama. Hillary Clinton bore in unmercifully on every one of The Donald’s weaknesses, on every one of his inconsistencies, and on every one of his multitudinous soft spots. By the time she was finished with The Donald, he was still standing only by force of habit, like a dinosaur that does not realize yet that its heart has been cut out. In short, Hillary Clinton eviscerated Donald Trump even if she’s far too well bred to have done the victory dance in the gory remains that other, male, politicians might have been tempted to do.
Yet, The Donald could have used Thursday night’s Al Smith dinner as an opportunity for damage control, but instead, like a chimpanzee hurling its feces, The Donald continued to dig himself in deeper with the performance that called forth almost unprecedented boos and catcalls from the normally restrained Al Smith dinner audience. In fine, this may go down as one of the worst 24 to 48 hours of the entire Trump campaign.
Donald Trump got pwned Wednesday night... By a girl!
Actually, it is the third time running that Donald has had his ass handed to him by Hillary Rodham Clinton. Both the New York Times and Vox.com have provided extensive, very able analyses of The Donald’s debate performance the other night. And both of them called particular attention to The Donald’s unwillingness to make a commitment to accept the results of an election that he might happen to lose.
Thursday morning, The Donald managed to kick the turd yet again saying, in effect, of course he will accept the results of the election... if he wins. The likelihood of The Donald actually winning the presidential election is quite small. Though exact figures very from day-to-day, Nate Silver’s fivethirtyeight.com rates the Donald’s chances of victory at somewhere between twelve and fourteen percent. For The Donald, Wednesday night’s debate may well have been his last chance to mitigate the hemorrhage of support he has been experiencing as his campaign enters late stage collapse.
And, mirabile dictu, Hillary demonstrated once again the truth of Albert Einstein’s dictum: “chance favors the prepared mind.” By contrast, Donald Trump once again demonstrated the truth of the old military advantage of the Seven Ps: Piss Poor Preparation Produces Piss Poor Performance. As in the prior two debates, The Donald’s lack of self-awareness and his abysmal want of self-control gave Hillary and her team and altogether perfect blueprint, a roadmap into the vulnerabilities of the Trump psyche, which Hillary exploited brilliantly. Her debate performance last night was, in fine, one of the most brilliant pieces of political and forensic jujitsu ever carried off in a presidential debate. By the time the quondam Secretary of State had finished with The Orange One, there was nothing left. Like a dinosaur that does not realize that its heart has been cut out, The Donald remained standing by nothing more than force of habit. And Hillary herself, having eviscerated The Donald, is far too well brought up to have done the victory dance in the gory remains that other, male, politicians might have done.
Naturally, the Trump people refused to recognize their candidate’s evisceration for what it was; Trump himself engaged in his usual undisciplined emission of tweets in the small hours the morning to reassure the deplorable faithful that he had in fact “won” Wednesday night’s debate in the face of overwhelming evidence the contrary. Of course, some self-sabotaging Democrats insisted this morning that Hillary’s masterful performance had been anything but ladylike. These weak-kneed Stockholm syndrome Democrats felt that Hillary had been “rude” to The Donald, that she had been somehow wrong to “descend to his level.” I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a scandalous misuse of Michelle Obama’s classic adjuration that “when they go low, we go high.”
Because Democrats need to stop unilaterally disarming in political fights. As much as one does not bring a knife to a gunfight, we Democrats should also heed the counsel of Sean Connery’s character in the 1987 remake of the Untouchables: “they pull a knife; you pull a gun. They send one of yours the hospital; you send one of theirs to the morgue!” Hillary understood that last night, even if a lot of puritanically weak-kneed Democrats did not.
And so, despite Republican lies and weak kneed Democratic handwringing, Hillary Clinton well and truly pwned Donald Trump last night. It was, in many ways, emblematic of the methodical way in which Hillary Clinton has built an astonishingly successful campaign, a campaign that, as more than one commentator has observed, made excellent use of the unique, feminine strengths that women can bring to a presidential campaign. While The Donald (and to a lesser extent, Bernie Sanders) were appealing to the macho sensibility inherent in a large rallies and his scripted events, Hillary was quietly meeting with small groups and coalition building in the classic sense of retail politics. She was establishing her bona fides in intimate “small room” settings where she was able to make powerful and long-standing contacts with voters who could carry her “gospel” out into the community. Indeed, Hillary’s campaign had about it a kind of Apostolic quality; Scripture tells us that with Twelve, Jesus set in train the salvation of the world.
Indeed, Hillary learned from the 2008 campaign invaluable lessons that have stood her in good stead in 2016. For this has been a campaign that did not end with a defeated Hillary yielding pride of place to a man, albeit having left 17 million cracks in the glass ceiling, but which blew that glass ceiling to smithereens and shows every indication of triumphantly carrying Hillary back to the White House as the first woman President of the United States. I’m proud to say that #imwithher.
Postscript: The Donald had a perfect chance to redeem his piss poor performance in Wednesday night’s debate, had he prepared properly for the Al Smith dinner last night. But, once again, failing to understand that piss poor preparation produces piss poor performance, The Donald once again scorned preparation and thought that he could wing it. Unfortunately, The Donald’s adolescent faith in his ability to wing it once again let him down. His unbelievably heavy-handed and utterly lame attempts at humor at Hillary Clinton’s expense quickly crossed the line from the sort of dry, self-deprecating humor to be expected from the Al Smith dinner into the scorched-earth realms of sheer political insult.
The boos and catcalls that came The Donald’s way ought to have disabused him of any notion that his attempts at humor had been at all successful. Unfortunately, the Donald remains abysmally un-self-aware of his boorish behavior. In short, in the words of presidential historian Michael Beschloss, The Donald bombed at the Al Smith dinner. While some weak kneed Democrats, seeking some kind of moral equivalency, have tried to frame Hillary'sperformance at the Al Smith dinner as somehow just as bad, the fact remains that for of those of us who saw The Donald’s piss poor performance, he didn’t just bomb, he bombed bigly. Last night could have been the “do over” by which he controlled the damage from Wednesday night, but The Donald managed, as he always seems to do against Hillary Clinton, incontinently to fling away the opportunity.
The final word on Donald Trump’s piss poor performance at the Al Smith dinner can probably go to sometime Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, who said of the Palestinians: “they’ve never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity.” Like the feckless Palestinians of half a century ago, Donald J. Trump has never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity. The Al Smith dinner may have been his last chance to stave off a defeat of historic proportions. Instead, the twenty-eight hours between the start of the third debate and the end of the Al Smith dinner may well have been Donald Trump’s Schwarzer Tag des deutschen Heeres, his own Black Day of the German Army, when the Kaiser’s forces sustained a defeat before Amiens that led to the collapse of the German war effort, the fall of Imperial Germany, and the ignominious flight of the Hohenzollern dynasty into exile. All Trump can hope for at this stage is that there will still be deplorables out there to believe his fabricated Dolchstoßlegende, his phony stab-in-the-back "the election is rigged, rigged, I tell you!" narrative.
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PAUL S. MARCHAND is an attorney who lives and practices in Cathedral City, California, where he served for eight years on the city council. He is an unapologetic liberal Democrat and a proud, viscerally partisan, Hillary Clinton supporter. He believes Donald Trump is not only a traitor, but a palpable threat to both America’s national security and the well-being of our public institutions of self-government. The views set forth herein are his own. Come for him, and you may find that he is a surprisingly good shot.
