The Guardian reports that Nigel Farage, the one-time leader of Britain’s xenophobic, pro-Brexit party UKIP, may coach Donald Trump before the next debate. As usual, there have been mixed signals from the Trump camp. The message from Trump himself is that he won handily and that implies that he does not need any debating advice. But others in the party and his camp are worried that he may repeat his widely panned performance and want to try and steer him away from another poor showing.
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A couple of days ago we had yet another report of the shooting death of an unarmed black man by the police. The police say that he had been acting suspiciously. It seems like this is happening every other day and it got me thinking about how differently one assesses risks of death at the hands of the police depending on one’s ethnicity or socio-economic status.
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As we have seen, Donald Trump seems to place a great deal of importance on women’s looks. Matt Pearce writes that when he visited his properties, he would tell the managers to fire any woman on the staff that did not meet his standards and replace them with prettier women, and the managers had to scramble to find workarounds in order to save those women’s jobs.
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At the Labour Party conference held two days ago, newly–re-elected leader Jeremy Corbyn surprised observers by delivering a powerful speech that resulted in a standing ovation. It was a call for Labour to return to its socialist roots and reject the words of the doomsayers who think that neoliberalism is the way of the future and that Labour is heading to its doom. You can read the full text of his speech and here are some short excerpts.
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It is becoming increasingly clear that Donald Trump is smarting from his performance in the first debate. Initially, just after the debate, he seemed to think he had done pretty well, praising the moderator Lester Holt for doing a great job. This is not unusual for people like Trump who are so wrapped up in themselves that they do not realize how others see them until they are told, and even then dismissing any suggestion that they were less than excellent. But the fact that there was near unanimity that he was handed his hat by Hillary Clinton has sunk in and definitely got under his skin and he has started lashing out, calling the moderator biased, renewing his attacks on Alicia Machado, and even bizarrely suggesting that someone had tampered with his microphone.
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I do not mean that Donald Trump himself is overweight but that he seems to have an almost visceral dislike of people who are over the conventional norms of weight. For example, he is like an adolescent in the way he rates women’s looks but he reserves his most vicious attacks for people like Rosie O’Donnell whom he has at various times referred to as “a woman out of control,” a “true loser,” a “total train wreck,” “disgusting,” a “slob,” “fat, ugly” “.
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I have had the luxury of reading what others are saying about the debate. Steven Rosenfeld said that the debate was a condensed form of what has been playing out in the campaign. Amy Davidson said that came off as a bully who failed in his attempt at intimidation. Adele M. Stan said that Clinton managed to expose Trump’s “racism, sexism and venality” and compared it the Billy Jean King-Bobby Riggs encounter.
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I will not go into details on the first debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. There are many detailed analyses online with a transcript here, and Tessa Stuart provides transcripts of the main exchanges. But in my view, Clinton easily got the better of Trump. It was clear that she had resisted the suggestions that she try and show a warm, personal side in order to counter the perception that she is cold and not trustworthy. Instead she went with her strengths, which is policy wonkery presented in a calm and collected way and combined it with deft needling of Trump that got increasingly under his skin as the evening wore on. It was a masterful performance on her part.
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