If you've spent any time sampling cable news over the last week, you've undoubtedly heard it: multiple pundits asserting that all Donald Trump has to do during next Monday’s debate is avoid having a total mind-blowing meltdown on stage. Ya know, just not overtly mock a disabled person or call for open season on Hillary Clinton from "the Second Amendment people.” That's it.
What about policy, you say? Pshaw! Quit being silly—the guy's as ignorant as a slug on anything related to governing, so why even try?
This is the attitude that's prompted Hillary Clinton's team to pointedly raise the bar of expectations for debate moderators and journalists to actually do something Matt Lauer failed to do at the Commander in Chief forum: correct Donald Trump's fountain of lies in real time as they flow from his mouth.
Greg Sargent, who's an integral part of the Washington media, interviewed Clinton spokesperson Brian Fallon about the campaign's efforts.
“Any assessment of Trump’s performance should rise or fall on whether he continues to resort back to his long-debunked lies,” Fallon said. “These types of lies should be treated as disqualifying. It would be unfathomable to anoint him successful in the debates if he’s persisting in those types of lies. That can’t be ignored in the grading of his performance.”
Many observers who want to see Trump defeated — your humble blogger included — have expressed hopes that the media’s first draft version of the first debate will not judge him against a phony, arbitrary, media-generated standard of “low expectations” when it comes to his knowledge and temperament, which would amount to giving him credit for not being quite as ignorant, unhinged, and abusive as usual.
Of course, there's no end to Donnie's lies, but for starters:
...the claim that he originally opposed the Iraq War; the idea that Clinton started birtherism and that he finished it; the suggestion that Clinton wants open borders; the idea that Barack Obama founded ISIS; and so forth.
As many as 100 million people will tune into the debates next Monday evening, many of them getting their first whiff of Trump. Sargent certainly isn't the only journalist writing about how the media will handle Trump Monday, but he's a respected member of the Washington press—in other words, one of its own putting the others on notice. That's a start.
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