Hillary gets under Trump’s skin
Donald Trump claims he knows more about how to defeat ISIS than the generals.
He’s lying!
He’d risen to the rank of captain at New York Military Academy back in 1964, so he’s convinced he knows a thing or two about vanquishing complicated enemies.
After being a cadet, he avoided military service, since he benefitted from a total of eight deferments from 1964 until 1972.
Capt. Donald claims to know lots about a lot of things. Yet he’s always been a little short on details.
So, when Hillary Clinton took Capt. Trump to the campaign woodshed last week, including that nonsense about him knowing more about how to defeat ISIS than the generals, he could’ve responded by furnishing reasons why he does.
He didn’t.
Instead, he preferred to nitpick her reading skills.
“Bad performance by Crooked Hillary Clinton! Reading poorly from the teleprompter! She doesn’t even look presidential,” the good captain remarked.
Could it be that Trump has allowed Clinton to get under his thin skin?
They should have taught him in military school not to flinch when under attack by an approaching enemy.
He must’ve been absent that day.
At Trump’s first campaign stop after Hillary’s fusillade, he resorted to his now familiar, and recycled claims that she’s dishonest.
“Liar. Lyin’ Hillary. Liar. Ted Cruz is no longer a liar. We don’t say Lyin’ ted anymore. We love Ted! We don’t want to say Lyin’ Ted. Lyin’ Crooked Hillary,” he told his adoring crowd.
While Clinton had methodically given point-by-point reasons why Trump is “unfit” to be in control of the nation’s military, he, in turn, resorted to regurgitated name-calling.
I’m not that opposed to name-calling, but if that’s all you got…
On a day when Capt. Trump got his most sought after endorsement (from House Speaker Paul Ryan), he was so busy hurling insults at Hillary Clinton, that news went unnoticed on the stump.
On the same day, another powerful Republican, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, appeared to be suffering from a little buyer’s remorse after he’d endorsed Trump.
“I think that the attacks that he’s routinely engaged in was a big mistake,” McConnell told CNN’s Jake Tapper. “What he ought to be doing now is trying to unify the party, and I think attacking people once you have won, it’s a time to be gracious and try to bring the party together.”
That comes after Trump has twice attacked the U.S. District Judge, Gonzalo Curiel, who’s presiding over two of three class-action fraud lawsuits involving his Trump University.
Trump claims Judge Curiel is a “hater” after he ordered the release of 150 pages of internal Trump University documents. And then he wistfully mentioned that he’s a Mexican.
Curiel is an America, who was born in Indiana. But in Captain Trump’s world, because Curiel’s parents were from Mexico, that makes him Mexican.
Oh, we’ve seen that nonsense before.
There’s a certain president, I’ve heard, who found himself the target of that kind of thing.
But Trump went even further.
Because Trump repeatedly squawks about building that wall on the southern border, he tied Judge Curiel, American or not, to a supposed “conflict of interest” in his legal disputes.
No wonder Hillary Clinton seems to have struck one of Captain Donald’s nerves.
She’s called him dangerous, divisive and not worthy of the presidency.
And he does what only he can do.
He proves she’s right.
For the Republican Party to survive Captain Trump, it appears it’ll have to bite its collective tongue and hope for the best.
A major political entity that had claimed to make a concerted effort to draw support from all corners of the electorate, is now saddled with a presidential candidate who is hell bent on diminishing that support.
Let’s suppose Capt. Trump truly means well; that he does have the best interests of the country at heart.
Then this could be considered the biggest case of political sleight-of-hand on record.
Edward A. Owens is a three-time Emmy Award winner and 20-year veteran of television news. E-mail him at freedoms@bellatlantic.net