Judging the debate: a point by point analysis

[Final-Fan]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Az1JyDJ_iKU
First excerpt approximately 1:25 to 9:55; second, 11:45 to 20:20

"What I object to in Trump isn't his bigotry, or misogyny, or demagoguery, even.  I think I share many people's opinion that this is partly an act.  And now I don't know why I think that; it's just a hunch.  I don't know the man, and I don't know anyone who knows him, or at least I'm not aware I know of anyone who knows him, but I would not be at all surprised to learn that he is far more liberal and psychologically balanced than he appears, and that he doesn't actually have a racist bone in his body, for instance.  This strikes me as possible.  What does not strike me as possible is that he might actually be a brilliant and extraordinarily knowledgeable person who is qualified to be President of the United States.  There is simply too much evidence for the poverty of his thinking.  There's too much evidence that he knows nothing about the world, and that he does not care that he knows nothing about it.  He's just winging it.  He gives the overwhelming impression of being a con man.  The journalist michael Kinsley once said that Al Gore was an old person's idea of a young person.  That was certainly fitting.  I think you could say of Trump that he is a poor person's idea of a rich person.  I mean, he's a fat cat in the comic strip.  He brags about how much money he has, all the while probably lying about how much money he has, but he'll stand at the podium and say, "I am rich; I am so rich; I am really, really rich," and people applaud.  Who is applauding this?  At the core of this, the core of what bothers me about Trump, is the vacuousness of his speech.  He will literally say the same thing three times in a row, and it was meaningless the first time.  The problem is, the caricatures of him are true.  He'll say, "It's going to be amazing; you won't believe how amazing it will be; it will be very, very amazing."  This is an intellectual problem, okay?  Smart people don't talk this way.  When people are speaking, they're thinking out loud.  I am thinking out loud at this moment.  If you listen to my podcast for a few hours, you know how I think.  So when people don't make sense, it's not like they're thinking brilliant, incisive thoughts in the privacy of their minds, and then they just sound like dummies when they open their mouths.  Generally speaking, what you hear is what they've got.  Yes, it's true that not every smart person is a great public speaker.  And you can find great speakers who are essentially just reading what some smarter person wrote.  But it is significant that Trump never manages to utter a single extemporaneous string of sentences that is deep, insightful, or even interesting.  This reveals something about him—and this is a point I made on Rogan's podcast, and I think I'll give you the same analogy here—imagine you have an urn, and every time you reach into it, you pull out another piece of junk.  You've just got broken glass, and zip ties, and bits of bone, all right, nothing of value.  Well, while it might seem unlikely, it's not impossible that something of tremendous value is also in there.  You could pull the Hope Diamond out of there if you just keep fishing around.  Now, that's possible because what you pull out in each round doesn't really indicate what else is in there.  Minds are not like that; ideas are connected.  The ability to reason well is transferable from one domain to another, and so is an inability to reason.  A desire not to seem incoherent:  this is something that intelligent, well-informed people tend to have.  Yet when you hear someone speak, at length, on topics that are crucial to the most important enterprise they're engaging in, and all they've got is bluster and bombast and banality strewn with factual errors, it is quite irrational to believe that there is a brilliant mind behind all of that just waiting to get out.  Trump is not hiding his light under a bushel; he is all bushel.  And bizarrely, I've heard from people who think that because he is rich he must be deeply knowledgeable about economics at the very least.  No—and you should read what largely conservative economists have written about the prospects of a Trump presidency.  They are terrified of this:  the idea that we might want to default on our national debt, that we can renegotiate it as though the United States were a golf course or a casino that was going under.  We're talking about a world-destabilizing bit of stupidity, and only one of many that he's given voice to. 

"And as far as the war against global jihadism is concerned, many of you are confused, frankly, about the supercifial similarity between his positions, if I can call them that, the noises he has made on these topics, and the kind of views I've expressed in the past.  Yes, I've said that, under certain conditions, torture would be ethical—in fact, you'd have to be a moral monster not to use force to get someone to talk.  I've said this in the context of believing that torture should always be illegal.  We should have a policy that we don't use it.  And the cases I've described are absolute corner conditions where somebody would be moved to break the law and we wouldn't prosecute them because at the end of the day we recognized that it was ethical to do so.  Who knows when or if these situations would emerge?  I have largely written this in the context of trying to understand ethics more deeply.  Trump is a presidential candidate who's bragging about how he will torture people.  I wouldn't think I would have to go into all that is wrong with that.  This would be disastrous for our standing in the world. 

"I am someone who bemoaned our political correctness about the connection between Muslim violence and the doctrine of Islam, and Trump is someone who seems to speak with refreshing condor on this topic.  He's even said that we should bar all Muslims from entering the United States, if only for a time.  Well, apart from being a totally unworkable, unethical, and needlessly inflammatory policy prescription, it is just absolutely obvious that Trump doesn't know anything about Islam or jihadism.  He is an ignoramus on this topic and every topic related to it, and it is obvious.  At one point he was confusing the Quds Force with the Kurds, right, this guy's head is not in the game.  Now, I'm sure he's gonna cram before the final exam before the debates with Clinton and he will be able to speak a paragraph on this topic that isn't starkly delusional, but if you push beyond that paragraph he will once again expose his basic ignorance of Middle East politics and history and the theology of Islam.  And while it is true that Clinton spoons out the most sanctimonious pablum on the topic of Islam, there is abundant evidence that she understands the nature of the problem.  She is in fact far more hawkish than most liberals are comfortable with.  She has already shown a commitment to killing jihadists, every bit as much of a commitment as Trump claims to have.  Yes, the fact that Middle Eastern governments have given money to the Clinton Foundation?  That is politically indecent.  Do I think that will cloud Clinton's judgment in the war on terror?  That does not seem likely at all.  Even if I thought that were likely, Trump is a scarier prospect." 

"Now in response to anything I might say against Trump, his supporters will raise Clinton's email scandal, so, this is a concern of a totally different order than the ones I've voiced against Trump.  Trump has ideas that are extraordinarily destructive and he has a relationship to his own ignorance that is dangerous.  He thinks the notion of human-caused climate change is a Chinese hoax meant to destroy our manufacturing base.  The prospect of a President believing that is terrifying.  Clinton's email scandal—well, what do you actually think was going on there?  Do you think she's a spy?  Do you think she was sharing state secrets with the Russians?  No.  She wanted to keep her email private and didn't understand the implications of running stuff on her own server.  It was a sloppy, stupid thing to do.  With Trump, we're talking about someone who has ideas about what our nation should do that are anchored to nothing other than his own personal urges.  This is a guy who spent months and months publicly worrying about President Obama's birth certificate.  If you want to understand how deep his anti-intellectualism runs, consider the fraud of Trump University, where he bilked poor and elderly people out of their money in return for pseudoknowledge.  This is who Clinton is running against.  We have to get out of the wilderness of false equivalence here.  Yes, there's a lot to say about Clinton, and if you're gonna bring her husband into it there's just a wasteland of embarrassment there.  But these are not the sorts of things that could push the career of our species into the ditch.  Trump shows every sign of being that sort of character, where a combination of hubris and ignorance of a sort that we have never seen could create extraordinary economic and political chaos.  There is nothing like that on Clinton's side, hence a "lesser of two evils" argument makes perfect sense here. 

"The amazing thing about Trump is that he is so terrible that he has completely reset everyone's expectations of what is conceivably acceptable in a presidential candidate.  You've seen the footage of him openly mocking a disable reporter, right?  Imagine what that would have done to any other person's campaign.  Imagine President Obama, eight years ago, doing that.  Imagine Hillary Clinton, today, doing that.  That's the end of the campaign.  Trump has done a dozen things like that that are so unpresidential, that show such poor judgment, suck a lack of impulse control, such a pettiness, such narcissism, such emotional and intellectual immaturity, it would be inconceivable to promote such a person in any other context as the candidate of a major political party.  And yet here we are with Trump.  And I do share the view that has been expressed by many and that I actually expressed early on that liberals, in their political correctness, are largely culpable for this, because we are all tired of political correctness.  Being a bully and a braggart and a buffoon is not the only way to disavow political correctness.  But I believe it is true that everyone's loss of patience with politically correct lies has allowed one of the most fraudulent and egocentric people who has ever walked the earth [to] launch what is now an all-too-plausible bid for the presidency. 

"And political correctness is even now confusing people about Trump.  It's causing them to focus on the points of least concern and in fact remain blind to what is attractive about him for people.  Take the case of the judge who's presiding over the Trump University lawsuit.  Now, this is the American-born judge who Trump has said can't cover the case fairly because of his Mexican heritage.  And then when asked if a Muslim judge could judge the case fairly he said, "Uh, that might a problem too," given what he has said about Muslims.  And these two comments are being considered, even by Republicans who have recently endorsed him, to be totally beyond the pale.  Paul Ryan said that these were "textbook" racist comments, though I think he's still endorsing him, which suggests something about Paul Ryan's principles.  But these comments, more than anything else Trump has said or done, seem to have rattled everybody, Democrat and Republican.  But I think people are actually fixated on the wrong thing here.  I watched those interview with Trump and I actually think it's possible to have a charitable interpretation of what he said, what he meant, given the fact that he thinks he's being screwed over by a judge—I'm sure he's wrong about that, but let's just say that's his perception.  It is possible to interpret what he said in a non-racist way.  He's basically talking about bias.  He's saying, "Listen.  I want to build a wall between the U.S. and Mexico.  This has made many Mexican-Americans, or people with strong feelings on this topic, despise me.  And so it is with the Muslim community for what I've said about immigration.  So how could I expect to be judged fairly?  What guarantee do I have that this judge isn't being ruled by a very understandable bias against me?"  So he was just speaking, true to form, without any concern for political correctness.  And this is what people love about him.  The people who love him loved this.  He is plain-spoken.  He's not gonna bend an inch to accomodate the social anxieties of preachy social-justice hypocrites.  And that is his strength among the people who love him.  You're not going to beat him by criticizing that.  However, what is truly reprehensible here is his total unawareness of the legal and social implications of what he's suggesting should happen, right?  Imagine if you could ask a judge who was white, or a woman, or black, or old to recuse him- or herself just based on one of these superficial characteristics and the possibility of bias.  Our judicial system would grind to a halt.  Totally unworkable—insane—once again absolute proof that Trump is just winging it.  He has no idea what he's talking about.  And so it is with everything else he has suggested he wants to do or might want to do to the press or to other institutions in our society based on his presidential power.  But to fixate on his racism here is is to miss the actual danger of the guy and also to fail to see that what you're calling racism is the very thing that the people who love him, who are craving honesty, love about him.  And it's not that they're racist, necessarily, either.  (Yes, I'm sure all the racists in the country also love Trump, for obvious reasons, so he's getting those votes, too.)  But the crucial point to absorb here is that the people who support him, even at moments like this, without it being an expression of their own racism, and without their perceiving racism in him.  What I see in the love for Trump among smart people, right, not racist dummies, is a total loss of patience for political correctness."