Run away, I’m about to get political!
Still there?
For those who were living under a rock the past year or so, last night presented (lucky us!) the last of the three Presidential debates. It was also the only one I watched start to end. For the record, I caught large chunks of the other two but was in and out of the room during each.
My opinion, for what its worth: Donald Trump proved yet again, as if he hadn’t done so 21,987,450,289,145 times before, that he simply isn’t qualified, tempermentally or intellecutally, to be President of the United States.
Having said that, I’m not surprised he made it this far in the electoral process. In the first phase of the election and when he was in the primaries facing a large group of other Republican candidates, Mr. Trump was brilliant at cutting them to the quick. The Republican front runner going into this race, Jeb Bush, was slaughtered by Mr. Trump…and rather quickly. After knocking out the Republican “favorite”, the others he faced were revealed to be weak sisters and Mr. Trump had a target rich environment to knock down.
However, things fell apart rather quickly when it was just Trump v Clinton: Dawn of Justice.
When facing one rival candidate and with the press scrutinizing his actions more (no others to scrutinize but these two), the seams showed. Mr. Trump’s sharp wit turned into thin-skinned shrillness and his petty statements against Mexicans or Muslims or Judges or Gold Star Family members or, incredibly, a previous Miss Universe (!) winner, wound up grating.
Sure, there were many who even now admire this talk and I have little doubt he’ll garner a fair number of votes. Having said that, I suspect there are few people out there, “professional” political observers or not, who feel the number of votes Mr. Trump ultimately receives will give him any sort of chance of winning this election.
Over at FiveThirtyEight.com, which offers a “poll of the polls”, they peg the chances of Hillary Clinton winning the election at nearly 90%. Notably, this has been the case since roughly October the 5th. If you look around that page, you’ll find Mr. Trump’s downfall began shortly after his poor performance in the first Presidential Debate on September 26th and reached that high point and has remained there these past 15 days, which of course does not bode well for the remaining 18.
Could things change?
Of course they could. As I said, there’s still 18 days to go before the election but early voting has already begun in several states. In Florida, you can request a mail-in ballot and we’ve already gotten ours. Early indications are that there will be many people voting this time around and, in general, the more people vote, the better it appears to be for the Democratic candidate(s).
The bottom line? Brace yourselves.
By the way, the high (actually low) light of the debate for me? While many were shocked that Mr. Trump hinted he wouldn’t accept the results of the election, I wasn’t. He’s been doing this for weeks now, why was it such a shock he’d do so now?
This, to me, is Mr. Trump’s very worst moment and it proved, as if we needed even more proof, how thin-skinned he is: