Steve Benen summarizes the nightmare of a debate for Mr Trump:
A few weeks ago, Kamala Harris delivered an acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention and told an obvious truth: Donald Trump, the vice president reminded voters, is “easy to manipulate.” In context, she was referring to foreign powers, but the simple observation also proved to be the basis for Harris’ strategy for her first debate against the former president.
Headed into the event, the Democrat’s strategy was hardly a secret. I lost count of how many published reports I saw exploring Harris’ plan to bait the Republican with traps she hoped he’d fall into. Hillary Clinton told The New York Times last week that she’d spoken to her party’s candidate about the debate, and the former secretary of state said her advice was straightforward: “She should bait him. He can be rattled.”
In theory, Trump and his team should’ve seen all of this and prepared accordingly. After all, Democrats spent weeks effectively broadcasting their playbook, telling the whole world exactly what Harris intended to do. It was like watching the run-up to a Super Bowl, in which one team’s coaches speak publicly about which plays they are eager to call.
But in practice, the GOP nominee simply couldn’t help himself.
It’s been a long summer, and the succulents seem to love it.
And Mr Trump has long been rumored to be both a misogynist and a bigot. I can’t really speak to those points, although circumstantial evidence does support the contention – including this one.
A bigot, and a misogynist is a bigot as it applies to women, isn’t just a hater. A bigot has a certain set of beliefs concerning a group of people that is at variance with reality. For example, the Southern racists believed their slaves were, truly, subhuman, and when freed slaves formed military units and marched against the Confederates, sometimes successfully, it was a shock for the Confederates. Welcome to reality, boys, and hell is your first stop after you’re dead.
Thus, the reports that Trump hardly prepared, if at all, make sense: he believes himself innately superior to his opponent, a woman, and thus didn’t prepare. He discovers, too late, the discordancy of his beliefs with reality, and loses so badly he feels it necessary to run back out and “report” snap polls made him the victor.
And it doesn’t help that he’s aged and mentally deficient, untrained in governance, and generally a failure in his one term.
This is why true bigots continually fail, with only occasional success when their opponents are also unprepared: they don’t apprehend reality properly. That’s what appeared to happen with Mr Trump.
