Wednesday night will probably be the last time Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are ever in a room together. (Unless Madam President accepts the invitation to Trump’s next wedding.) But other than as a historical footnote, this debate doesn’t really matter.
One of the more revealing windows into the Trump campaign came after the second debate. In real time, every Trump supporter (and many Trump skeptics) I know went crazy about how he “won” the debate. I didn’t buy it myself—it struck me as a victory only in the sense that it would keep the Republican leadership from attempting to push him off the ticket entirely. And if you want to count that as a win, then so be it.
Yet the polls done immediately in the aftermath of the debate showed that viewers thought Clinton won. It wasn’t even close. What that should tell you is that voters have basically decided to tune Trump out. If you’re part of the 38 percent of the country who is for Trump at this point, then your support is pretty firm and you’re going to stay with him no matter how he does at the debate tonight.
But for everyone else? They’re not listening. Even if Trump improves—even if he actually does win the debate—it’s not going to help. Because voters have already decided to take a hard pass.
So in lieu of over-thinking the debate, I’ll leave you with two questions about what is likely to be one of the issues tonight: Will Trump continue to insist that the election is rigged?
(1) Let’s say that the election is rigged. Why is it, then, that Trump can’t counter-rig it to his own advantage? After all, the guy spent the entire Republican primary bragging about his ability to rig every system he’s ever come across—from bankruptcy laws, to political influence peddling, to divorces, to his tax filings. But now he says he can’t rig a single presidential election? Hmmmm. Maybe he’s not an all-powerful god-king who could get the “best deals” for America after all.
(2) It’s possible that Trump will try to de-escalate his rigging claims and apply them only to the treatment he’s getting on behalf of the media. But again, remember back during the primaries when his supporters claimed that the constant, non-stop coverage of Trump was proof of “his genius ability to manipulate the media”?
So what happened? Either his super-powered genius suddenly went away. Or it turns out that Trump wasn’t manipulating the media so much as it was the media manipulating the Republican party.
