Post Debate Memo to Donald Trump From a Never-Hillary Voter
Okay, Donald, you’re not going to like this. But if you wanted to hear from a yes-man, you would have let Christie out of the basement. So here’s the deal: We GOP voters didn’t overlook your long years of schmoozing with corrupt Democrats, your childish attacks on solid conservatives like Ted Cruz, and your cartoonish public persona, just to have you blow this thing in the home stretch. We nominated, for better or worse, a guy who body-slammed and head-shaved Vince McMahon in a wrestling ring on TV.
What we saw last night was more like George Pataki — nervous, defensive, wonkish, boring, and worried about your legacy. If you win this thing, you’re the president. You’ll have upended U.S. politics. If you lose, you have no legacy. You’ll be a cautionary tale, which the GOP establishment uses to nominate Paul Ryan next time. How’s that going to feel?
In last night’s debate, you started off strong, like an angry boxer blowing all his steam in the first three rounds. Then you let Hillary Clinton play you. She played you like a fiddle — no, I take that back. Sometimes we don’t mind hearing a fiddle. She played you like an accordion. Every time she pushed a button and squeezed, you made the exact wheezing sound that she wanted. And she leaned back and gave that same icy smile that psychologists painted on the wiry monkey mama. Please, for the love of everything that is decent, don’t hand our government to that woman.
Every time she attacked something that you hold dear, like your business acumen, you took the bait and swam right up to the surface where she could spear you. Only once or twice did you hit back effectively — for instance, when she pressed you on your tax returns and you came back and demanded her emails. But then you let it drop — an issue that ought to disqualify Clinton completely from serving as president. Then you actually let her bloviate about the importance of “cyber-security.” Even “little” Marco Rubio would have been pounding on the lectern at that point demanding:
How DARE you, of all people, even mention that! You broke the law, violated the rules, evaded government safeguards, and sent classified materials floating around the Internet — which who knows what countries are using to track down our friends and allies and murder them. Your underlings are all hiding behind immunity and the 5th Amendment, and you barely escaped being put into handcuffs and arrested — because you intentionally destroyed the evidence. You’re the Al Capone of foreign policy — except he got caught on a technicality, while you managed to skate. Maybe you had some friends at the Justice Department.
Why didn’t you point out that your tax returns don’t affect America’s security, did not result in dead Americans and launch a wave of dangerous Muslim immigrants, like her amateur-hour meddling in Libya? Then you could have reminded Americans how Hillary wants to increase the number of unvettable Muslim immigrants into America — like the Cascade Mall shooter from Turkey who is a Hillary supporter. Instead of thinking about reams of boring tax filings, Americans would have been wondering how many more pressure cooker bombers Hillary wants to resettle in their home towns.
You need to stop defending the honor of your hotel chains. Stop thundering like Ralph Kramden (of The Honeymooners) about how wonderful your temperament is. You stopped just short of saying something like “Bang, zoom, Alice — right to the moon!” Remember that in each of those arguments, Alice won.
Stop wandering into the weeds with references and names that only make sense to reporters but not to the public. That tells the media pros who have been targeting you since the convention that they’re getting inside your head. You had Hillary dead to rights on starting the ridiculous birther issue — but you squandered that moment by rattling off boring names and facts. John Kasich could have done that, if that was what we wanted — with more entertaining hand gestures.
Why didn’t you talk about the bribery and influence-peddling operation that is the Clinton Foundation, which sold access to the Department of State in return for secret donations from murderous governments like Saudi Arabia — which hatched most of the 9/11 hijackers, and beheads women and gays? Why didn’t you talk about the uranium deal with Russia that the government had turned down, and suddenly approved after the Russians made a big donation to Bill? How about Hillary’s right-hand woman, Huma Abedin, whose magazine tries to radicalize Muslims throughout the West, and published pieces blaming domestic abuse on women, and blaming the 9/11 attacks on American policies?
When Hillary accused you of stiffing building contractors, why didn’t you answer that she lied to the families of four Americans who died in Benghazi on her watch, blaming what she knew was an al Qaeda attack on a Coptic Christian’s Internet video?
More so than most politicians in the past 30 years, you know how to be funny. We didn’t see that last night. I was hoping that you’d interrupt Hillary’s blather about her father’s drapery business with a classic Trumpian zinger — for instance, “Where was your father on Nov. 23, 1963? I think America deserves to know.” The audience would have loved it, and it would actually have helped defuse some of the resentment which we Cruz voters still treasure despite his endorsement.
Instead, you seemed rattled and touchy. That’s not even the real you, most of the time. You are typically blithely, even blindly self-confident. It’s Hillary who’s the paranoid, secretive, misanthropic control freak. Americans need to see that, before it’s too late.
You need to hit Clinton hard, relentlessly hard, on her deep personal corruption and radical policies — which don’t even flow from conviction, but cold and soulless ambition. You can get away with hitting back at a mean girl — you’ve proven that. Those who despise you for being a bit of a cad are already Hillary stalwarts. Now the rest of us need to see you use that power for good, instead of … stupid. You’re Jimmy Cagney, facing Lady Macbeth, and you’re the one holding a grapefruit. We want to see you use it. (For more from the author of “Post Debate Memo to Donald Trump From a Never-Hillary Voter” please click HERE)
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