The puppet and the puppeteer
Donald Trump’s plan to become America’s faith-healer appears to be in jeopardy.
He only has himself to blame. Too bad he’s so busy blaming everybody else.
He laments that the news media, Hillary Clinton and her staff, the Democratic Party and even a selected assortment of Republicans are all the reasons for his rapidly sinking campaign – not “The Donald.”
Bah!
The truth is, he can dish it out, but he sure as heck can’t take it.
His reddish thin-skin gets severely bruised with only the slightest challenge to his (self-described) superiority.
He keeps telling his followers that, “America will get tired of winning,” when he’s elected president.
At this point, I wonder if he’s getting tired of losing.
As I write this, the Real Clear Politics national average of presidential polls, has him 6.4 percent behind Clinton.
That’s worthy of comparison to the 2012 presidential election.
President Obama beat Mitt Romney by a whopping five million votes nationwide.
But the margin of victory was only 3.9 percent.
If the polls hold, a 6.4 percent margin of victory would be nothing, if not a landslide.
And while Obama won handily, picking up 332 electoral votes (of the 270 to win re-election) in 2012, there are some predictions that Hillary Clinton could reach as high as 352 electoral votes.
No wonder Trump tried, but failed, to land a knockout punch against Clinton at last Wednesday night’s final presidential debate.
Instead, his petulant responses to Clinton’s well-planned gut-punches, revealed him as being a little slow on the uptake.
When they locked horns about Russia and Vladimir Putin, Trump claimed that Putin would respect him more than Clinton, or Obama.
With that, Hillary saw her opening.
She shot back, “That’s because he’d rather have a puppet as president.”
Here’s how a self-proclaimed “winner” fails badly.
“No puppet. No puppet. You’re the puppet,” he fired back. Just in case nobody her him the first time, he added, “You’re the puppet,” again.
It was one of those moments that takes us all back to the playground in fifth grade at recess.
There were a few moments when Trump seemed to get the upper-hand.
But he kept getting snarled in his own inability to land a punch without showing the sting of Clinton’s much harder counterpunches.
She’d brought up a subject that seems like ancient history (thanks the revelation of Trump’s video-taped vulgarity) – his tax returns.
That’s been an obvious weakness for Trump, since it’s been discovered that he had managed to pay little, or no income taxes for years.
She used that line of attack for a springboard to a later jab about Social Security.
She claimed that under her plan for Social Security she’d have to pay higher payroll taxes, and so would Trump, “If he doesn’t get out of it.”
Once again, Trump could have failed to take the bait. He could’ve parried and thrusted his way out of an obvious needling.
He didn’t.
“Such a nasty woman,” he bristled.
Trump has never been timid about telling everybody that, “Nobody respects women more than (he) I do.”
In fact, he’d said it earlier in the debate.
It’s part of his campaign shtick. Unfortunately, the facts don’t seem to support that claim.
Calling a woman “nasty” in front of the entire nation, is one of those facts.
But this is Donald Trump, remember?
He simply bores full speed ahead, without worrying about what he says now — even if it’s in direct contradiction to what he’ll say 15 minutes from now.
When somebody isn’t bound to any real philosophy, consistency be damned!
So, when a woman implies that he’s a puppet “puppet,” he returns fire, by calling her one too.
Even though a few minutes earlier, he engaged in a dispute about a video-tape, where he found himself being led down the path to making disgusting statements about women, by an eager, young TV host.
That doesn’t exactly prove Hillary Clinton is a puppet.
She played him like she’s the puppeteer.
And he fell for it, as if he didn’t see that coming.
Edward A. Owens is a three-time Emmy Award winner and 20-year veteran of television news. E-mail him at freedoms@bellatlantic.net