Will Donald Trump Be Afraid To Debate Hillary Clinton?

Would've thought Trump would be belly up after the kind of weekend he had.

Twitter says he gained ground. Did he win? Amazing. She's just so mortally wounded from all her crap, she can't even beat a Trump.

At least she finally admitted she's a big fracker.

Here's that image embedded:

Who is that blonde man with the microphone?

US TV host Billy Bush has been suspended from NBC's Today show after a video tape emerged in which he and Donald Trump made lewd comments.

Today executive Noah Oppenheim wrote in a memo to the morning show's staff that there is "simply no excuse for Billy's language and behaviour on that tape".

Mr Bush has said he was "embarrassed and ashamed" at the remarks.

US presidential candidate Mr Trump has also apologised for the obscene comments made in the 2005 tape.

In the video, Mr Trump was on a bus talking to Mr Bush - then host of NBC's Access Hollywood - ahead of a segment they were about to record.

Mr Trump says "you can do anything" to women "when you're a star" and also brags about trying to grope and kiss women.

Mr Bush tells Mr Trump at one point "the Donald has scored" and also comments on a woman's "good legs".


Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks at a town hall-style forum in Sandown, New Hampshire.Image copyright AP
Image caption
Mr Trump has said the words "don't reflect" who he is

The presenter, who is the first cousin of former President George W Bush, has since said: "It's no excuse, but this happened 11 years ago - I was younger, less mature, and acted foolishly in playing along. I'm very sorry."

Top Republicans have condemned Mr Trump for the comments. His election rival Hillary Clinton called them "horrific".

The Republican party nominee has said "these words don't reflect who I am... I apologise".

Bush joined the Today team in August, having been anchor of Access Hollywood since 2009 and co-host of Access Hollywood Live since 2010.

Mr Oppenheim said that there would be a "further review" of the matter and did not say how long Mr Bush would be suspended for.

The second presidential debate on Sunday night was a strange one, with Donald Trump appearing to be on the brink of a meltdown in the first 20 to 30 minutes and then steadying himself the rest of the way. But here’s the bottom line: Based on post-debate polls, Hillary Clinton probably ended the night in a better place than she started it. And almost without question, she ended the weekend — counting the debate, the revelation on Friday of a 2005 tape in which Trump was recorded appearing to condone unwanted sexual contact against women, and the Republican reaction to the tape — in an improved position.

At times during the past two weeks, but particularly on Saturday afternoon as prominent Republicans were denouncing or unendorsing Trump one after another, it has seemed like Trump’s campaign is experiencing the political equivalent of a stock market crash. By that I mean: There’s some bad news that triggers the crash, and there’s also an element of panic and herd behavior, and it becomes hard to tell exactly which is which. At some point, the market usually finds its footing, as the stock has some fundamental value higher than zero. But it can be a long way down before it does.



At roughly the 20-minute mark of Sunday’s debate — about the point at which Trump said that he’d appoint a special prosecutor to investigate Clinton and that she’d “be in jail” if someone like him had been president — it seemed prudent to wonder whether Trump’s campaign was over. I don’t mean over in a literal sense (it would be almost impossible to replace Trump on the ballot). But over in the sense that we knew the outcome of the election for all intents and purposes, to a higher degree of confidence than FiveThirtyEight’s statistical models — which gave Clinton “only” about an 80 percent chance of winning heading into the debate — alone implied. (The polls — and therefore the models — have not yet had time to capture any effect from the Trump tape revelations.)

After all, the past two weeks have gone about as badly as possible for Trump. After having drawn the race to a fairly close position, Trump took one of the most lopsided defeats ever at the first debate in New York on Sept. 26. Then he engaged in a weeklong battle with a former Miss Universe, Alicia Machado, which the Clinton campaign gleefully egged on. Then the story broke that Trump had claimed losses of more than $900 million in 1995 and perhaps had not paid federal income taxes for 18 years.

But wait, there’s more! After a relatively effective vice presidential debate for Mike Pence earlier in the week — although it didn’t appear to have helped Trump in the polling — The Washington Post dropped its story about the tape Friday afternoon. By Saturday, Republican defections were getting bad enough that Trump was fending off rumors that Pence would quit the race. And then Trump began his Sunday evening at a makeshift press conference that featured three women who have accused Bill Clinton of sexual harassment or sexual assault and a fourth woman who was raped by a man Hillary Clinton represented at trial in 1975. The Bill Clinton sex story might be of interest to Drudge Report readers and parts of Trump’s base, but most Americans are tired of hearing about it, at least in an election in which Bill Clinton isn’t running for office. And then in the first 20 minutes of the debate, Trump brought up the Bill Clinton accusations again and threatened to imprison Hillary Clinton, without showing any of the contrition that Republican leaders were calling for.

But Trump made it through the rest of the debate with a relatively good performance — or at least, so I thought. He was oftentimes meandering but fairly measured, and he was effective at pressing Clinton on Obamacare and her email server, for instance. The key term, however, is “relatively.” I’ve covered enough debates to know that other than in the really obvious cases, it can be hard to judge how voters will perceive a performance. So you grasp on to what you can find: prediction markets, which began to show Trump rebounding about halfway through the debate; real-time reaction from focus groups; and the sentiment of other journalists.

This inevitably introduces the possibility of groupthink and various other biases, such as judging a candidate’s performance relative “to expectations” (i.e., relative to the media’s expectations, not the voters’ expectations) instead of in any absolute sense. Once expectations were lowered to the point that we in the media were speculating about whether Trump’s own running mate might drop out, any half-decent performance was bound to look good.

It’s not clear that voters judge debates in the same way, however. A CNN poll of debate watchers found that even though most voters thought Trump exceeded expectations, 57 percent of them nevertheless declared Clinton the winner, compared with 34 percent for Trump. A YouGov poll of debate watchers showed a much closer outcome, but with Clinton also winning, 47 percent to 42 percent.

These instant-reaction polls actually do have a correlation with post-debate horse-race polls: The candidate who wins the former usually gains in the latter. Perhaps Clinton’s win was modest enough that this will be an exception, especially given that the sentiments of pundits and television commentators (which sometimes matter as much as the debate itself) were all over the map.

• Clinton exaggerated when she said the U.S. was now “energy independent.” The country imported 11% of total energy consumed in 2015.

• Trump falsely said he never tweeted “check out a sex tape” in the wee hours of the morning a few days after the first presidential debate. He did.

• Trump told Clinton “after getting the subpoena” to turn over documents related to the Benghazi investigation “you delete 33,000 emails.” A contractor managing Clinton’s server deleted the emails. There is no evidence Clinton knew when they were deleted.

• Trump also said Clinton’s emails were “acid washed,” calling it a “very expensive process.” Neither statement is true. The emails were deleted using a free software program that does not involve the use of chemicals.

• Clinton said there is “no evidence that anyone hacked the server I was using.” That is true, but the FBI said it was “possible” that her email system was hacked because she sent and received emails in “the territory of sophisticated adversaries.”

• Clinton said intelligence officials said this week that Russians were behind political hacking attacks in the U.S. Trump said, “She doesn’t know if Russia is doing the hacking.” Clinton is closer to the truth.

• Clinton claimed she was holding up Abraham Lincoln as an example of leadership when she defended “back room” deals. Turns out, she did.

• Trump distorted the facts about a rape case that Clinton was involved in as a legal aid lawyer in 1975, wrongly accusing Clinton of “laughing at” the victim.

• Both candidates distorted the other’s tax plan. Trump said Clinton was “raising everybody’s taxes massively,” when two analyses concluded almost all of the tax increases she proposes would fall on the top 10%. And Clinton claimed Trump’s plan “would end up raising taxes on middle class families.” Some families would see increased taxes, but on average middle-income taxpayers would get a tax cut.

• Trump wrongly claimed that Clinton’s 2008 campaign manager said on TV that the campaign had started the false rumor that Obama was not born in the U.S.

• Trump wrongly claimed that Clinton wanted to implement a government-run, “single-payer,” health care system, like Canada’s, and he cherry-picked high proposed premium increases in the Affordable Care Act exchanges.

• Clinton went too far in saying an ACA provision to allow young adults to stay on their parents plans until age 26 was “something that didn’t happen before.” At least 31 states had similar provisions before the law was enacted.

• Trump said that “Ambassador [Chris] Stevens sent 600 requests for help” before he was killed in an attack on the U.S. diplomatic post in Benghazi, Libya, in September 2012. But not all 600 were requests for security upgrades, nor were they all from Stevens.

• The candidates disagreed over Clinton’s role in a U.S. response to Syrian President Bashar Assad’s use of chemical weapons. Both had a point. Clinton was in office when President Obama said Assad’s use of chemical weapons would cross a “red line for us,” but she was gone when Obama failed to back up his threat.

• Clinton claimed that since the Great Recession the gains have all gone to the top, but a 2016 economic report said that in 2014 and 2015 “the incomes of bottom 99% families have finally started recovering in earnest.”

• Trump again claimed without evidence that “many people saw the bombs all over the apartment” of the San Bernardino shooters.

And there were more claims that we’ve heard before on trade, foreign affairs and nuclear weapons.

The second of three presidential debates was held on Oct. 9 at Washington University in St. Louis. The much-anticipated town-hall-style matchup came as both candidates were facing renewed scrutiny: Trump for lewd comments about women made in 2005 but just released on Oct. 7, and Clinton for the public release of hacked emails from her campaign. As in the first debate, we found plenty of distortions of fact.