2016 Postmortem
Related: About this forumTrump Asks Supporters to Tell Him to Attack Hillary More
By Ed Kilgore
Donald Trumps campaign continues to make up new rules for post-debate behavior. First, they were frantic to claim he won overwhelmingly, while the candidate himself spent time attacking the Venezuelan beauty-pageant winner whose treatment at his hands was the subject of a pretty effective volley by Hillary Clinton on Monday night. But now, Team Trump is looking ahead
with a strange survey of his supporters.
Framed as a Debate Preparation Survey in anticipation of the next debate, it asks 30 questions about what Trump did or should have done in the first debate. Eighteen of the 29 questions test out attack lines on Hillary Clinton. Mostly, they involve issues and pseudo-issues he failed to bring up in the first debate (Should Trump attack Hillary for referring to tens of millions of American men and women as deplorables? and Should Trump have called out Hillarys massive Wall Street fundraising and the paid speeches that she refuses to release to the public?). There are proposed attacks on Clinton involving Obamacare, too, and her alleged hatred of coal miners.
There is approximately a zero percent chance that respondents to Trumps survey will say no to any of these proposed attack lines. Had its designers offered Hell yes! or Damn straight! as options, they might have obtained some relatively useful information. As it is, the survey appears to represent an indirect apology for Trumps failure to cover the anti-Clinton landscape the first time around, along with a permission slip for him to go medieval on his opponent at the next opportunity.
Another possible motive could be to set up expectations for what future moderators ought to be asking the candidates about, so that anything other than an inquisition of Hillary Clinton can be described as biased. That could be a bit tricky for the next debate, with a town hall format wherein all the questions will be posed by real people in the audience or online. Team Trump probably should not attack the American people or their representatives for failing to focus sufficiently on Benghazi.
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http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/09/trump-asks-supporters-to-tell-him-to-attack-hillary-more.html
underpants
(182,819 posts)I guess the grain alcohol was flowing through his followers at that point.
The_Casual_Observer
(27,742 posts)Looks like desparation to me.