The "principled" banality of the Middle School shouting match.
Excerpt: "Rubio acted a little too pleased with his hits, like a guy doing an extended dance after hitting a single in the company softball game."
What We Learned from the Donald Trump-Marco Rubio Screamfest
BY AMY DAVIDSON
The New Yorker
Donald Trump stood in the middle of a stage in Houston, Texas, on Thursday night at a debate hosted by CNN and Telemundo. His opponents were yelling. Trump gestured at one of them, Senator Marco Rubio, and said, “First of all, this guy is a choke artist, and this guy”—he swivelled a finger toward Ted Cruz—“is a liar.” He kept talking over protests from both men, and again pointed at each of them. “He can’t do it for the obvious reason, and he can’t do it because he doesn’t know how to tell the truth. Other than that, I rest my case.” Trump put down his hands and pulled in his shoulders, like a scavenger bird waiting for the next dead iguana. The ensuing bids for the floor from Rubio and Cruz proved so impossible to adjudicate that Wolf Blitzer, the main moderator, resorted to calling on Governor John Kasich, of Ohio, who, along with Ben Carson, had been ignored for much of what was a loud and bitter night.
“Choke artist” may seem unjust to Rubio and his supporters (it’s harder to say whether “liar” bothered Cruz). Rubio didn’t choke, or not the way he did in the debate before the New Hampshire primary, when he was unable, for an interval, to do anything but repeat himself. (Trump remembered that as “one of the saddest things I’ve ever seen”; Rubio accused him of doing the same thing.) Rubio’s plan, clear from his opening statement, was to attack Trump, largely by bringing up items from the past that might make Trump seem like a hypocrite and a cheat. “He hired workers from Poland, and he had to pay a million dollars in a judgment,” Rubio said, early on, grinning and practically hopping. “I’m sure people are Googling it right now. Look it up: ‘Trump Polish Workers.’ ” He added, a few minutes later, “Again, go online and Google it! ‘Donald Trump, Polish workers.’ You’ll see it.” The Polish-worker story, which involved a contractor Trump hired to tear down Bonwit Teller, the department store on the site of the present Trump Tower, in 1979, was easy to find, even if Rubio didn’t get it quite right. (According to Politifact, Rubio’s version was “half true.”) It was one of those vignettes, like the story of the widow in New Jersey whose home almost became a Trump-casino parking lot, that Trump’s opponents feel ought to be devastating; another one, which Rubio also brought up, was the failed Trump University. Cruz, seconding Rubio on the Polish workers and Trump U., made it clear that he’d had his own, even darker renditions prepared, in which the words “federal court” and “conspiracy” figured heavily. Rubio will have earned points for taking on Trump with donors and other Republicans, who were beginning to worry that their party’s nomination would be handed over without a fight.
But the search-engine instructions were a reminder that Rubio’s own authority is not great. He got off a few more lines—“If he builds the wall the way he built Trump Towers, he’ll be using illegal immigrant labor to do it”—but Trump clawed his way back. “I’m the only one on the stage that’s hired people. You haven’t hired anybody.” And he began throwing his own dirt—about Rubio’s personal finances, how every last person in the Senate despises Cruz, and how they were “politicians”; he was a businessman. If he made Trump-branded ties in China, it was because the Chinese manipulated the currency—“Well, you don’t know a thing about business,” he said, when Rubio questioned him on that point.
Trump’s central argument seems to be that anything he has done that might be odd for a Republican candidate, such as giving money to Democrats, could be explained by the general corruption of everything. Health-care industry experts said that his plan wouldn’t work? “The insurance companies take care of the politicians.” He’d even given five thousand dollars to Ted Cruz (who offered, onstage, to give it back) and had been an object of supplication for Rubio (who had sent him an inscribed copy of his book), he said. And now he, Trump, would put an end to all that. He’d already started: “I always say I’m not having Oreos anymore, which is true, by the way.” Nabisco had moved some operations to Mexico.
Earlier in the day, Vicente Fox, the former President of Mexico, said, with regard to a certain Trump proposal, “I’m not going to pay for that fucking wall.” Trump, who breathes crude invective, said that Fox’s language was “filthy.” He also said, “The wall just got ten feet taller, believe me.” Cruz and Rubio want a wall; so do Kasich and Carson. The entire debate was characterized by a walled-in myopia. Trump, asked about a comment he made about acting as a neutral party to get a deal between the Israelis and the Palestinians—Did this mean that he wasn’t on the Israelis’ side?—talked about how he had been “the grand marshal down Fifth Avenue a number of years ago for the Israeli Day Parade.” (There, he might have met an alternative-history version of Trump that Rubio had summoned up earlier in the debate: a Trump who, had he been given no money from his father to get his business going, would be “selling watches in Manhattan.”) Cruz, meanwhile, railed against the idea of anybody making any deals at all, ever.
One reminder of the strangeness of this campaign came when Trump, asked if he would finally release his tax returns, said that he would not, because he is being audited—“It’s very unfair, because I’ve been audited for, I think, over twelve years”—and had his negotiating position to think of. In terms of nondisclosure excuses in a Presidential race, this was novel. (As Trump spoke, Mitt Romney, who had his own tax-return saga, was furiously tweeting, pointing out that an audit was not a bar against releasing the returns.) But there’s no bright line of respectability here. The intellectual climate of the Republican Party has prepared voters to nod knowingly at stories like Trump’s. Cruz, who wondered if the I.R.S. might have come across evidence of Trumpian fraud, has said that he would get rid of the I.R.S. if elected. And Carson, when he finally got the floor, used his time to say that he, too, had been audited, for what he suggested were political reasons related to his criticism of President Obama at the National Prayer Breakfast. “The fact of the matter is the I.R.S. is not honest and we need to get rid of them,” Carson said. (After the debate ended, Trump went even further, raising the possibility, to CNN’s Chris Cuomo, that he was being audited because he was a “strong Christian.”)
There’s a very good chance that Trump will be the nominee of one of the country’s two major parties—last night’s debate likely won’t change that. There are only a few days until Super Tuesday, and Trump is well ahead in most states, though not in Texas, Cruz’s home. And no one else onstage seemed all that Presidential. Rubio acted a little too pleased with his hits, like a guy doing an extended dance after hitting a single in the company softball game. It didn’t help that his lines seemed memorized. Cruz, in one of his cross-talking squabbles, was effectively shut down when Trump called him a “basket case.” Carson, discussing judicial nominees, said he’d look at the “fruit salad of their life.” Kasich said that he’d have resolved the Apple-F.B.I. fight by secretly locking all the parties in a room. More important, the debate was empty of a counterbalancing vision. When the radio host Hugh Hewitt asked about “the issue that keeps me up at night, which is religious liberty,” none of the candidates responded with a critique of Trump’s plan to ban non-citizen Muslims from entering the United States (which, unlike the Polish workers, they did not have to search for), or of his interest in closing mosques. They knew that that wasn’t what Hewitt cared about, as opposed to his fear that Christian religious institutions would “have to bend their knee and provide morning-after pills.” Their positions are not so far from Trump’s. In this area, the mystery may not be why they don’t attack Trump’s policies but why so many supposedly serious candidates basically agree with him.
They certainly don’t agree in all areas. Cruz, with leading questions and prosecutorial zeal, forced Trump to acknowledge that Cruz does not, indeed, want people to die “on the sidewalks and the streets.” Cruz made it clear that he considered this a damning admission. And Trump said, as he has before, that although he opposed abortion rights and would defund Planned Parenthood, he was glad that the group screened women for cancer. A party that regards such a position as mad radicalism is likely to be confused by Trump, and to deserve him.
“I know you’re embarrassed,” Trump said to his fellow candidates, referring to his lead in the polls. “I know you’re embarrassed, but keep fighting—keep swinging, men. Swing for the fences.” Or, as it grows higher and higher in the imagination of Republican primary voters, swing for the wall.
Source: http://www.newyorker.com/news/amy-davidson/lessons-from-the-donald-trump-marco-rubio-screamfest
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