Judging the debate: a point by point analysis

[Final-Fan]

Norris2k said:

Final-Fan said:

My answer would be this:  for all the wealth Trump has amassed, his actual power is tiny compared to that of the President of the United States.  If he is this crooked as a businessman, how can you imagine he will not be incredibly corrupt when put into the most powerful office on the planet?  It's not uncertain in my view.  If Trump's corruption is small scale it is because despite being a billionaire he is operating at small scale compared to the United States government.  What he is asking you to do is to let him run the bigtime show, when you already know he's spent his time running the sideshow picking customers' pockets. 

"Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power."  ~Abraham Lincoln

Secondly, add to that the fact that Clinton actually knows how to run the country and deal with foreign powers, while Trump does not.  And he refuses to learn, as is shown by the debate. 

Thirdly, I believe Trump operates on this business mindset:  Any publicity is good publicity, because you don't have to win over everybody and you don't even have to win over the majority of people.  You only have to win over enough people to keep your business going.  So if you cast a wide enough net, even a smaller percentage will do.  I believe that's why he's spent his whole life tending to his public image.  It's why he is obsessed with being on the winning side and never admits to losing in the past, present, or future, regardless of evidence.  This apparently works for his businesses on average (remembering that he's gone bankrupt several times), but it's not a good way to approach the operation of a government that is supposed to work for the whole population.  And I think the way it affects his thinking is very dangerous, because if you can never admit to losing, it's hard to admit you have to change course. 

Two key quotes from a NY Times article: 
Mr. Trump, for his part, sought to blame everything but himself. During an appearance on Fox News on Tuesday, he charged that the moderator, Lester Holt of NBC News, had become overly aggressive with him — although he inaccurately said that Mr. Holt had questioned him over a 1973 federal discrimination lawsuit against Mr. Trump’s company. (Mrs. Clinton had raised the lawsuit question.) He also suggested that his performance was related to a faulty mike — even though he was perfectly audible during the telecast — and that he may have been the victim of sabotage.

The team had primed Mr. Trump to look for roughly a dozen key phrases and expressions Mrs. Clinton uses when she is uncertain or uncomfortable, but he did not seem to pay attention during the practice sessions, one aide said, and failed to home in on her vulnerabilities during the debate.

He apparently doesn't want to study and/or isn't good at it, and these are TERRIFYING qualities for a presidential candidate to have, especially one who is not already familiar with how the government works.  There is a podcast episode by a guy named Sam Harris that I think illuminates this point well.  I will quote a significant section of what he said in a separate post due to its size, and I really recommend you read the post fully.  If you'd like, I do encourage you to listen to the whole thing and see if it convinces you of anything you didn't already know about Trump. 

"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."

But you mostly talked about topics very far away from the comparison base you talked about. I mean, ecology is a very important matter, but not relevant in the matter. What you are saying is that Trump does not have the scale and immorality (from my perspective regarding public servant mission) because he did not have the power yet. But that would make him at most as bad, not worst. And it's not even sure that scam and all translate into corruption. Some can steal their company, not there family, Wall Street is not betting on him.

About not knowing the world, and that's again an other subject, I'm not sure if that matters as much as being willing to do something or anything outside what the very companies and countries that created the problems decides. I mean, look at Putin he is certainly not the best economist and nicest person in town, but he understood quite quickly that by breaking the oligarchy owning the petrol and converting petroleum industry into state owned companies, he could easily fuel 2 decades of growth, improve average revenue and rebuild the military. The only reasons that prevented the previous presidents to do so was corruption, ideology, and legal concerns. Unfair competition (self-regulation, tax, unfair competitors) for economy, unending ISIS problem (bad relationship with Russia and obsession against Assad, bad management of illegal immigration) are some of the biggest problems. It could be just as simple as having a little bit of common sense and not doing again the same thing.

I don't really see where I talked about ecology, but now that you mention it Trump has made extremely dangerous proposals on that topic.  You may not like the EPA's regulations but you probably do not remember the huge problems we have had in the past on environmental issues.  Abolishing the EPA would be tantamout to inviting those problems back. 

If you don't think that the scams he's run on thousands of people over multiple projects, AND THE FUCKING BRIBES HE'S GIVEN, indicate a very, very, very strong likelihood to be corrupt in office as President, I really don't know what to say. 

What I don't think you see is that "not doing the same thing" does not therefore constitute "having a little common sense".  You're proposing trading a crook for a madman, a shadowy figure for a moustache-twirling villain. 

Another couple of quotes from Sam Harris, whom I had never heard of a week ago but whom I like more and more by the day: 

When I hear Trump speak extemporaneously, I hear someone very often getting prompted by his own misstatements to complete a thought in a way that he clearly didn't intend to.  Which is to say that the thing he's now saying doesn't reflect anything he believed or even thought about before.  But he's saying it now because the last thing he spoke just launched him there.  It's as though he's speaking in verse and he's forced again and again to complete the rhyme.  It's like he says, "There was once a man from Nantucket," and he's got to finish the thought, so he says, "who always carried a bucket."  But he didn't know he was going to say bucket.  But now he's stuck with it.  And now he'll go to the mat defending "bucket".  But he's rhyming about policy and about world leaders like Putin, and it's the rhyme of ignorance and error and bombast. 

Those of you who are mystified that I could forgive Clinton her obvious lying and other indiscretions just don't understand what a dangerous imbecile I think Trump is.  I really think he is a child in a man's body.  He is a malignantly selfish, ignorant, and petty person, and a tyrant in the making, insofar as our system could accomodate a tyrant.  As I said on that other podcast, if you're supporting the guy because he'll, quote, "shake things up", I think you're just playing a game of chicken with human history—and there's no one in the other car.  It is absolutely astonishing to me that this guy is a candidate for the presidency.  Now, obviously, those of you who support Trump must think I've been misled about him, but I don't think that's true.  I I believe that I see through the media spin against him.  I see that he's occasionally been treated unfairly.  He's also been treated far too fairly, and graded on a curve for almost everything of substance.  I mean, you saw Gary Johnson, the Libertarian candidate, get destroyed in the press for not knowing what Aleppo was.  Trump commits gaffes like that all the time, and people just move on.  And his gaffes are much worse.  His gaffes are policy prescriptions that he pretends to have thought through, and that would be disastrous if implemented. 

Like, at the Presidential forum the other day with Matt Lauer where he was asked about the war in Iraq—I'm going to actually read some of this—he was asked about the war in Iraq, and he said, "I've always said we should have just taken the oil."  When asked how he would do this, he says, and this is a quote, "Well, you, you just would leave a certain group behind, and you would take various sections where they have the oil.  People don't know this about Iraq, but they have among the largest oil reserves in the world.  You know, it used to be, 'to the victor go the spoils.'  Now, there was no victor here, believe me, there was no victor.  But I always said, 'take the oil.'  One of the benefits we would have had if we took the oil is ISIS would not have been able to take the oil and use the oil to fuel themselves," end quote. 

Now, it should be clear that this is much worse than just blanking on what Aleppo is.  This is just insanity.  Forget about the logistical problems of, quote, "just taking the oil."  Forget about the ethical problems of taking the main resource from a country we were ostensibly trying to help and further impoverishing tens of millions of people that we have just submitted to punishing sanctions for a decade and who we just freed from a brutal dictatorship.  What's he picturing happening in Iraq to the Iraqi people when we "just take their oil"?  Mass starvation?  Forget about that.  Forget about the fact that ISIS's primary funding hasn't been oil.  They were robbing banks and forcing people to just give them money.  Forget about that.  Just think about how the world, both Muslim and non-, would have responded to our invading Iraq and then just stealing their oil.  Which is to say, confirming the craziest conspiracy theories about why we invaded the country in the first place.  Trump is telling us that this is what he would have done had he inherited the ongoing problem of Iraq.  This is so much worse than not understanding what the word Aleppo means in the context of a weirdly posed question, and yet Trump gets away with it.  And, again, there have been probably hundreds of moments like this in the campaign.  In any case, I've bracketed all of the charges against him that seem spurious, and I've acknowledged that his plain talk about radical Islam is preferable to the sanctimonious lies we get out of the Democrats.  (And if you want to read about what Hillary could and should say about radical Islam, that article's on my blog.)  But I can't overlook the fact that the man shows every sign, really every sign, of being motivated by pure selfishness and narcissism, to be compared with Hillary's partial selfishness and narcissism, and he strikes me as being completely rudderless intellectually.  I mean, you want to understand how I see Trump?  Blow up a balloon without tying off the end and hold it up high and then release it.  Then watch it fly chaotically around the room. That’s Trump’s mind. In my view, that’s what we’d be doing with the country if we put him in charge:  just hitching our country to a totally chaotic system.  If that's your view of "shaking things up", you're a nihilist.