Last Rites At Last For The Self-Defeating Trump Candidacy?

Well, wasn't that something? The fourth (let's not forget the non-epic Pence v. Kaine) shitstorm in lieu of statesmanlike debate in this showdown between the two most unpopular presidential nominees in history is done and gone.
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Well, wasn't that something? The fourth (let's not forget the non-epic Pence v. Kaine) shitstorm in lieu of statesmanlike debate in this showdown between the two most unpopular presidential nominees in history is done and gone. Okay, done but not gone, as it will take a few days to reverberate through the echo chambers that make up our sickly body politic.

For all the sturm und drang of the big rhetorical roulette spin in Sin City, the die, as it were, may well have already been cast. Especially since Donald Trump, who did rather well in his exchanges with Hillary Clinton (especially counter-punching on the Middle Eastern wars), again went too far in some dramatic moments.

While there is no shortage of polling data, some of it questionable on both ends of the, ah, debate, one seemingly contradictory juxtaposition sticks out for me.

By a whopping 55 to 42 percent, likely voters in the brand-new Quinnipiac poll believe that the news media is biased against Trump. Yet in the same poll, Hillary has a six-point lead.

Why? Because Trump is just too unlikeable, obnoxious, aggressively know-nothing and simply unqualified to be president. Hillary is quite problematical as a potential president as the Wikileaks revelations about her and her associates are heightening her already massive credibility problems, per the undoubted long-range plan of Russian intelligence; yet is both qualified to hold the office and someone who won't leave us waking up every morning wondering what damn fool thing she might say next.

So, likely mission accomplished for the Clinton machine. By driving more than 70 percent of all presidential campaign TV advertising, with most of the media -- complicit in Trump's rise by treating him as an entertaining infotainment figure -- now in full hyper-partisan howl like the old MSNBC at its most fervent, a not quite majority of voters has just about been convinced.

Convinced of what? Well, that a seeming psychopathic jerk is a seeming psychopathic jerk. And that said not quite majority is poised to elect President Hillary Clinton. Principally on the basis of her opponent being a seeming psychopathic jerk.

Which would make her legitimacy essentially institutional, her mandate, as it were, largely defined by what she is not rather than what she is.

The reality is that, for all the myriad of attacks on him, it is Trump himself who has proved to be his own worst enemy.

"I'm sorry," "I accept responsibility," "I will do better," "I don't know but I will find out" -- those are all things that the chickenhawk Vietnam War draft dodger would have learned if he had actually served in the military rather than pretend he already had the equivalent experience as a misbehaving teenager sent to private military school to learn some badly needed discipline.

If Trump knew how to say such things, i.e., if he had been only half so dysfunctional, he would quite likely be winning against a candidate who has still failed to establish much of a positive predicate for her own candidacy, a candidate who almost certainly would have lost the Democratic nomination to Bernie Sanders had Russian intelligence really been out to defeat her by turning loose her secret speech transcripts during the primaries.

But that's like saying if my wheelbarrow had warp drive it would be a starship.

For Trump is what he is. The classic New Yorker anthem 'My Way' is certainly his own, despite his quite ludicrous attempt to claim Neil Young's anti-corporate 'Rockin' in the Free World.'

To be clear once again, I've been warning about Trump's ascendance and his hateful, know-nothing, frequently fascistic tendencies for more than a year. I never thought of him as an entertainment figure, and learned early on, when he got away with his preposterous claim that John McCain isn't really a war hero, that he was on to some alarmingly powerful stuff.

Yet he is right a bit more often than a stopped clock. That, and his mastery of our ADD media culture, combined with a vast reactionary vote and just enough voters who liked Obama but don't buy Hillary might well have been enough to win the White House.

But even a shrewd would-be populist can only be so obnoxious and erratic, so unreflective and clearly lacking in empathy, without his hopes finally erupting in flames.

That said, even if Trump is now something of a zombie candidate, he remains dangerous. This election should be over, and probably is over, but it will be over when it is over.

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