Donald Trump has made a mockery of American democracy. That fact was just made plain for an hour and a half on prime-time television, and no one—not the debate moderators, not his opponent, Hillary Clinton—could stop him.
The second presidential debate opened with the bang the American public had been waiting all weekend for: a reckoning over what Donald Trump’s “grab ’em by the pussy” tape meant.
Finally, we’ve found it—that line of decorum, morality, and democratic values that Donald Trump had to cross to earn repudiation of the Republican Party leadership. After Trump’s caught-on-tape discourse on pawing women’s genitals, GOP leaders are distancing themselves from Trump. Former Utah governor Jon Huntsman is even calling for Trump to pull out of the presidential race.
It’s hard to know what to expect from Trump at the second US presidential debate. Even though the reality-TV-star turned GOP nominee must improve on his first disastrous performance (and somehow do so while claiming to shun practice), the format on Sunday night (Oct. 9) will be completely different. It’s a town hall-style debate. Trump seldom does town halls. Even when his campaign sets one up, he tends to blow off the format and angrily deliver his stump speech instead.
The phalanxes of fact-checkers already know who won the vice presidential debate. And they’ll rub in Democrat Tim Kaine’s fact-based victory tomorrow (so brace yourself @RealDonaldTrump).
For a guy whose whole persona is based on speaking his mind, taking requests via comment card is a pretty weird move.
Donald Trump’s most compelling moment on the debate stage this week was his passionate tirade about trade. There’s just one problem: his argument hinges on accusing China of devaluing its currency which China isn’t, in fact, doing.
There was really only one big question hanging over Monday night’s debate: who was going to take the stage opposite Hillary Clinton?
Picking a president is always about personality, when you get right down to it. And this contest is between a candidate who wins votes by boasting about his business genius, and a woman whose headline quality is her nerdy work ethic. So the question going into tonight was, can the rich guy breeze his way through 90 minutes of debating the future of America—or can a wonk wrong-foot him?
There are 42 days until the US decides the next president. But if a snap election were held today, Donald Trump would win. That’s according to FiveThirtyEight now-cast, a model that aggregates polling data to tell you “who would win the election if it were held today.” Trump would have a 54.5% chance of winning if the US went to the polls today, at time of publishing (at 12.50pm ET).
Though you wouldn’t know it from the media hype, most political scientists think presidential debates usually have little influence on the election outcome, regardless of what people tell the pollsters.
When Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton take the debate stage on Monday night, the drama that plays out will be much deeper than the usual quadrennial bout between blue and red. Their differences reflect a dangerous struggle of forces within every democracy: populism over pluralism. And with her infamous “deplorables” remark, Clinton has given Trump, the populist, the upper hand in this debate.
It turns out Donald Trump the presidential candidate loves debt as much as Trump the real estate developer.
Donald Trump’s genius for lying approaches pathological. Witness his latest deceit—when he was finally compelled to correct his most infamous mega-fib, that president Barack Obama was born outside the US (and therefore can’t legally be president). What really happened was that Trump replaced the original “birther” lie with a couple of fat, shiny new ones:
The 2016 US presidential election has been a feeding frenzy in certain pro-Trump pockets of America. And the juiciest cut of all is immigration, which Donald Trump says is dragging down middle-class incomes.
With the unveiling of his new child care plan, Donald Trump showed America how seriously he takes intelligence of women—the voters he is desperately trying to woo. Not very seriously at all.
Despite the bleak picture of a destroyed middle class that presidential candidate Donald Trump has painted, the American middle-class family is doing pretty darn well. Compared to 2014, you might even say great.
Donald Trump’s understanding of charity is a little different from most people’s. The Republican nominee hasn’t donated to his own foundation since 2008, according to the Washington Post, which dug deep into the Trump Foundation’s financial history. The charity also made donation to political campaigns, and reported donations to charities that never received the money.
Hillary Clinton is now notorious for saying “you could put half of Trump’s supporters” in a “basket of deplorables”—those being racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, and Islamophobia. It was not her deftest political moment. The “sorry” that swiftly followed was half-baked. Literally, in a way—Clinton apologized only for the “half” part, reiterating that Trump has “built his campaign largely on prejudice and paranoia.”
Quick—think of a Trump supporter. The stereotype many will conjure is of an aging, blue-collar, white guy in a ”Hillary for prison” shirt, who’s losing out economically—and freaking out about it more by the day.
Donald Trump has staked his candidacy on immigration policy. Yet his proposed solutions are as small-minded as they are disturbingly ill-informed. As the election clock counts down to Nov. 8, here’s a handy guide to understanding what is and isn’t accurate when it comes to Trump’s depiction of American immigration trends.
Baby lobsters don’t just play with their food. They ride it.
Donald Trump’s big plan to make America great again, it turns out, is simply to keep America white. And the key to doing that is through a radical reworking of immigration policy, as Trump made clear in a speech in Arizona last night.
Something truly radical could happen on November 8, and it has nothing to do with electing the first female, or perhaps the first reality television star, as president. It’s the introduction of a better, fairer voting system altogether—at least on the state level.
