DJT is used to conning others, but in last night’s debate he was led into an elaborately laid trap and proved himself to be just another mark ripe for entrapping. Apparently the story Clinton told about Ms. Machado during one of the last segments of the debate had been carefully crafted for weeks ahead of time. So while it seemed to me as an observer to have been something she had prepared to bring up, I had no idea that her campaign had orchestrated an entire media event to follow it.
Matt Yglesias at VOX had the whole story and you should read it there. But the gist of it is that Ms. Machado had already filmed a 2 minute video, in Spanish, that the campaign released today. AND she sat for several high profile interviews, one with Cosmopolitan that came out today and one with the Guardian.
To make matters jollier, of course, Trump just could not let the debate episode wither away. He actually brought it up himself on Fox and Friends this morning. Yglesias winds up the piece:
Not just a crude bully, a racist, a liar, or a misogynist — it’s Donald Trump as a sucker. The feud with the Khan family from earlier this summer is widely regarded as a self-inflicted fiasco, but at a minimum it appears to have been a genuine accident — the Khans’ speech was not scheduled for primetime, and Democrats seem to have underrated how powerful it would be.
The new war with Machado is nothing like that. The Clinton campaign laid surprisingly intricate groundwork to turn her into a major story both at the debate and in the days following it.
And Trump fell for it, revealing a new side to himself that the public hasn’t really seen before.
So HRC just sucker punched the guy with the glass jaw and the thin skin. And he leaned into it, bigly.
