My reaction to the Donald Trump-Hillary Clinton debate can be summarised with one word: “How?”
How in the world do we put a man in the Oval Office who thinks Nato is a shopping mall where the tenants aren’t paying enough rent to the US landlord?
Nato is not a shopping mall; it is a strategic alliance that won the Cold War, keeps Europe a stable trading partner for US companies and prevents every European country — particularly Germany — from getting their own nukes to counterbalance Russia, by sheltering them all under America’s nuclear umbrella.
How do we put in the Oval Office a man who does not know enough “beef” about key policies to finish a two-minute answer on any issue without the hamburger helper of bluster, insults and repetition?
How do we put in the Oval Office a man who suggests that the recent spate of cyber-attacks — which any senior US intelligence official will tell you came without question from Russia — might not have come from Russia but from “somebody sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds”?
How do we put in the Oval Office a man who boasts that he tries to pay zero federal taxes but then complains that our airports and roads are falling apart and there is not enough money for our veterans?
Caught up in his own infallibility
How do we put in the Oval Office a man who tries to prove he was against the Iraq War — even though he publicly stated his support for it when it began — by saying he said so privately to his pal Sean Hannity at Fox News? Trump is so caught up with his own infallibility that he didn’t think to respond in the debate: “Yes, I supported the Iraq War as a private citizen, but Hillary voted for it as a senator when she had all the intelligence and whose job it was to make the right judgement.”
How do we put in the Oval Office someone who says we should not have gone into Iraq, but since we did, “we should have taken the oil — Daesh would not have been able to form ... because the oil was their primary source of income”.
Daesh formed before it managed to pump any oil, and it sustained itself with millions of dollars that it stole from Iraq’s central bank in Mosul. Meanwhile, Iraq has the world’s fifth-largest oil reserves — 140 billion barrels. Can you imagine how many years we’d have to stay there to pump it all and how much doing so would tarnish our moral standing around the world and energise every extremist?
How do we put in the Oval Office someone whose campaign manager has to go on every morning show after the debate and lie to try to make up for the nonsense her boss spouted? Kellyanne Conway told CNN on Tuesday morning that when it comes to climate change, “We don’t know what Hillary Clinton believes, because nobody ever asks her.”
Say what? As secretary of state, Clinton backed every global climate negotiation and clean energy initiative. That’s like saying no one knows Hillary’s position on women’s rights. Conway then went on CNBC’s Squawk Box and argued that Clinton, who was secretary of state from 2009 to 2013, had never created a job and was responsible for the lack of adequate “roads and bridges” in our country. When challenged on that by MGM Resorts’ CEO, James Murren — who argued that his business was up, that the economy was improving and that Clinton’s job as secretary of state was to create stability — Conway responded that Clinton had nothing to do with any improvements in the economy because “she’s never been president so she’s created no financial stability.”
I see: Everything wrong is Clinton’s fault and anything good is to the president’s credit alone. Silly. The Squawk Box segment was devoted to the fact that while Trump claims that he will get the economy growing, very few CEOs of major US companies are supporting him.
Markets can tell a con artist
Also, interesting how positively the stock market reacted to Trump’s debate defeat.
Maybe because CEOs and investors know that Trump and Conway are con artists and that recent statistics show income gaps are actually narrowing, wages are rising and poverty is easing.
The Trump-Conway shtick is to trash the country so they can make us great again. Fact: We have problems and not everyone is enjoying the fruits of our economy, but if you want to be an optimist about America, stand on your head — the country looks so much better from the bottom up. What you see are towns and regions not waiting for Washington, DC, but coming together themselves to fix infrastructure, education and governance. I see it everywhere I go.
I am not enamoured of Clinton’s stale, liberal, centralised view of politics, but she is sane and responsible; she’ll do her homework, can grow in the job, and might even work well with Republicans, as she did as a senator.
Trump promises change, but change that comes from someone who thinks people who pay taxes are suckers and who thinks he can show up before an audience of 100 million without preparation or real plans and talk about serious issues with no more sophistication than your crazy uncle — and expect to get away with it — is change America can’t afford.
Electing such a man would be insanity.
— New York Times News Service
Thomas L. Friedman is a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist and author.
