Last Night’s Republican Debate Had All The Earmarks Of An Actual Debate

I don’t have much to add to all the chattering pundits from last night’s debate. However, it seems pretty clear that “civil Trump” is very very dumb. He talked imperceptibly about things like Cuba “suing” the United States, and closing the Cuban embassy until we had a better deal. In fact, it was clear that he viewed everything in terms of a business negotiation. Say “goodbye” to words like “treaty” or “pact”. Everything is a deal now.

Trump insisted that would he have made “a better deal” with Cuba. There’s no word on what deal he’s talking about, but apparently he believes that the U.S. should have gotten something material in exchange for a return to normal diplomatic relations. (Maybe he wanted a hotel or two?) He said he would make a “good strong deal” because “right now, everything, every single aspect of this deal is in Cuba’s favor…all we do is keep giving. We give and give and give.”

He talked about how everything — including Social Security — could be fixed economically, just by fixing fraud and corruption. This is absurd. But it doesn’t matter to his supporters, as Kevin Drum says:

Donald Trump is so brain-dead ignorant that it beggars the imagination. But for decades conservatives have been training their followers to wallow in ignorance, tune out the media, and pay more attention to narrative than to basic arithmetic. And they’ve happily embraced the public faces of that ignorance, people like Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, and Matt Drudge.

Of course they ALL were, in their own way, pretty scary.

But what is making Trump scary now are his supporters and their belligerence as well as Trump’s support of them. This was obvious as well at this morning’s press conference in which Trump lied again about protesters “taking swings” at people in the audience and defended his supporters’ violence:

We’ve had some violent people as protesters. They’re not just saying “oh…” These are people that punch, these are violent people. I get the biggest crowds. By far. It’s not even a contest. You know, you people don’t like to report it. Actually the one good thing about protesters is you have to go into these massive stadiums with 25 and 30 thousand people because the cameras never turn.

Hey Ben, the cameras never ever turn and show the stadium. I always say turn and show the stadium and they don’t. But when there’s a protester up in the corner it’s great because the cameras all turn.Because it’s a negative as opposed to a positive so they turn.

But we’ve had a couple that were really violent and the particular one when I said to bang him, that was a very vicious guy who was swinging — was very loud — and then started swinging at the audience. And you know what? It swung back.

And I thought it was very, very appropriate. He was swinging. He was hitting people. And the audience hit back. And that’s what we need a little bit more of.

Now, I’m not talking about just a protestor. This was a guy who should not have been allowed to do what he did. And frankly, if you want to know the truth, the police were very, very restrained.

The police have been amazing.

Banfield played that footage and said they went back to the Las Vegas rally where the protester was allegedly “swinging” and they didn’t see any such thing.

And of course, the video at the NC rally below clearly shows a (white) man in a hat suckerpunching the (black) protester as he was being escorted away. Thankfully, there WAS an arrest there.