On Friday the Clinton campaign launched a single nuke. The aim was to decapitate the Trump campaign, to personally destroy candidate Trump, and to send a message to any other outsider who might in the future even think about challenging the leftist status quo. Probably the weapon was released earlier than originally planned. It was re-timed in order to preempt the Russian email dump exposing what Hillary has actually been saying to her Wall Street constituency.

The NBC-Washington Post-Clinton campaign audio tape of Mr Trump’s lewd 2005 comments was meant to crush him with women voters. It sent the entire Republican establishment running for the tall grass. Meanwhile, Chuck Todd of NBC dutifully declared the election over. Hillary had won. All she needed to do was show up at Sunday’s debate and collect her laurels.

For the Donald, this was the moment of crisis. What to do? On Saturday conservative pundits urged him to abase himself. Breitbart News – practically alone – urged him to go nuclear himself.

Trump’s decision was signaled by a pre-debate press availability. The media thought they were going to a routine photo session. Here’s what they found as they entered the room:

Donald Trump sitting at a table filled out with victims of Bill and Hillary Clinton’s past misdeeds. The sexual skeletons were out of the closet.

Here’s a photo of Bill taken shortly afterward:

Yes, that’s fear you see in his eyes. He was afraid the wronged women were literally going to come after him, right there in the main debate theater. They almost did. The people running the event saved him by telling Trump’s people that security would eject the women if they came close to the Clintons. But they did sit elsewhere in the room, leaving the Clintons on edge. Sorry, Hillary. Profit by the Clinton name, suffer for the Clinton name. You really shouldn’t have put a morality-neutron warhead on that nuke.

As an aside, here’s a photo of Melania Trump at the debate:

She didn’t get from Slovenia to that fancy suite atop the Trump Tower in Manhattan by getting the vapors about her husband’s behavior and clutching her pearls. She didn’t get there by wearing pearls. In fact at strategic junctures in her career she wasn’t wearing anything. On the other hand, she isn’t resorting to deceit and cynical misdirection either.

With that, to the debate itself. Here’s a chronology from Hot Air:

9:07 PM: Right out of the gate… [the candidates arrive on stage and simply nod tersely from a distance.] I suppose we’ll just do away with the handshakes.

9:20: It took a while to get through the tape discussion. Hillary really went at it hard, but Trump stuck to his “locker room talk” answer and then deflected. Hard to say who won that round. But when they moved to the next stage, Trump announced he would get a special prosecutor to go after Clinton. This. Is. War.

That last is a trademark quote from the late Andrew Breitbart. CNN correctly called Trump’s method on Sunday night a “Breitbart strategy.” It’s no accident that Stephen Bannon, the head a Breitbart, is a top Trump adviser. Yet this was Trump’s natural inclination anyway.

And it is war. By promising to put a special prosecutor on Hillary he’s making it very clear to her that she must either win the election or be meted the very fate her nuke was meant to cause for Donald. She nuked him. He nuked her back.

9:27: We moved onto the emails and Trump is unloading on her. Trump actually uses the phrase, “because you’d be in jail” when Hillary Clinton says it’s a good thing Trump isn’t running the country. Trump finishes attacking Clinton he goes after [CNN moderator] Anderson Cooper.

Here Mr Trump directly confronted the two-on-one (actually three-on-one) issue – and showed he could handle it. Biased moderators are mere conventional weapons. The conflict has gone beyond that now.

As to the “You’d be in jail” comment, that drew a predictable partisan response. Leftists spluttered “You can’t say that!” and Trump supporters exclaimed “Just what we wanted to hear!”

9:34: The Obamacare discussion was the first time I remember Hillary Clinton being pinned down to say that costs were unaffordable and it has to be fixed. Trump calls for scrapping it an introducing a new system. Trump accused her of wanting to shift to single payer. This is a terrible subject for Clinton.

9:50: Martha [CBS moderator Martha Radditz] asked Clinton about her leaked Wall Street speeches and actually used the phrase “is it okay to be two faced.” Hillary took it in stride (obviously had been memorizing this one) and blamed her “two positions” comments on watching a movie about Lincoln. Frankly I didn’t understand where she went from there. Trump’s response was as inflammatory as the rest. One observation on the second half hour of this show is that Trump probably read the book on how politicians normally conduct debates. He has now ripped that book up and set the pieces on fire. I’ve lost track of how many times Trump has called Clinton a liar.

Well, she is a liar and Trump wanted to be sure everybody has that part loud and clear. This is, after all, battle of the negatives – the most vulgar businessman in America versus the most odious politician.

9:57: I have no idea how this is going to play in the heartland, but Trump has pegged the aggression meter in going after Clinton. To her credit, she’s not gotten excessively flustered, but a lot of the answers from both of them are meandering so far from the original questions it’s difficult to judge…

Mr Trump is physically large and naturally intimidating, as this photo shows:

Hillary should get credit for standing her ground. She’s experienced and determined. Probably also medicated to the gills.

10:08: Somebody has been doing the counting of how often the moderators (particularly Martha) are interrupting the candidates. As of this point, they’ve interrupted Trump 14 times, Clinton just 3 times.

The final count was 26 and 12.

10:10: I marked this time stamp because it’s of great interest. At this moment, debate moderator Martha Raddatz answered one of Trump’s questions and began debating him by on Syria and our military strategy by saying, “Sometimes there are reasons the military has to do that.” So rather than waiting for Clinton to argue the point, she decided to do it for her.

10:30: In the closing moments, Trump seemed to do pretty well on the Supreme Court question and actually got Clinton to say she supports the Second Amendment. That was a rather surreal moment. They moved from there into an energy question which Trump was well prepared for. Clinton had to walk a tightrope there for her green energy backers, but it didn’t do much for the guy asking about not putting fossil fuel workers out on the streets.

10:40: Who won that debate? I went back and forth with a few friends on twitter over that question. The default answer is that supporters of both candidates will claim that they did. But if anyone was waiting for Trump to crumble under the onslaught it never happened. I’m sure many will say that he was too aggressive, and perhaps some voters will take that away. But he wasn’t bailing out of anything. For her part, Clinton never really melted down either. She was getting hammered pretty hard by both Trump and some of the questions, but she stood in there and took it and kept swinging. Trump needed a good night and my blurry impression after this feisty show is that he had one, but there wasn’t a knockout blow struck on either side…

As to who won, supporters were predictable. Flash polls by CNN and the Drudge Report had Hillary and Donald winning, respectively. More telling were the the grudging admissions of a Trump victory by the Never Trumpers at National Review and the Clinton loyalists at CBS News. In this, the most dramatic (or weird) presidential debate ever, Mr Trump had Mrs Clinton on the defensive throughout. He showed he had learned from his mistakes in the first debate, and that he can dominate not just in name-calling but also on points of substantive policy.

What exactly did he win? The chance to fight another day – something that was by no means assured going into the debate.

OK. What’s next after the initial nuclear exchange?

First, some BDA. The dueling leaks have hurt Trump with women and establishment Republicans while Clinton was hurt with Bernie Sanders supporters. The debate was a stop-the-rout victory for Trump. It will take time for polling to come through, but I suspect that we’ll find that the two candidates will be back where they were before the mushroom clouds started to appear.

Will there be launches of second-strike nuclear weapons? Yes, assuredly. Will they be more of the same? Probably. On Monday Wikileaks dropped 2086 new emails purloined from inside the Clinton camp. Also on Monday the American Thinker reported this:

David Brock, who runs [the Clinton opposition smear operation], has offered to pay the legal fees of employees who worked on Donald Trump’s TV show, The Apprentice, if they are sued for leaking tapes damaging to Trump. Apparently, the employees signed a contract with the producer of the show, Mark Burnett, that included a provision for a $5 million “leak fee” if any of the tapes came to light.

Translation: We’ll pay $5 million for a fresh piece of dirt on Trump (see – all those fat cat donations do have a purpose).

If you’re on the receiving end, a first strike ICBM and a second strike SLBM look pretty much the same.

Does either side have a political doomsday device? Possibly. The Clintonites will stop at nothing to get her into the White House. The Russians… well, let’s just say they have a range of strategic options.

Ultimately it’s Trump versus the whole establishment. The establishment is very powerful and very committed to retaining power.

You could shake your head and say “This is what American politics has come to.” But I say “This is better than meek surrender.” Joe Scarborough of MSNBC opined Monday that the GOP political class must now be saying “Oh, shoot…” Whoops. We folded too early. People might notice that. Scarborough’s MSNBC sidekick Mika Brezinski called them “pathetic, weak, spineless.”

As always when dealing with the left, we’re limited to three basic response options: submission (in this case abject apology), flight (in this case Trump dropping out of the race) or to fight (what Trump did Sunday night).

Better to die on your feet than live on your knees.

– Tacitus

Copyright 2016 Tacitus
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