Will Donald Trump Be Afraid To Debate Hillary Clinton?

He's already floated Ivanka for SoS!!! Cuz she's so smart.

Even with all this current talk about the debate prep going on and about the respective strategies of each side going into the debates... I still won't be convinced that Donald Trump will actually debate Hillary Clinton until I see his huckster ass on that stage.

You got a way with words. I bet many people would watch if he does show up. The debate may even be decent competition for whatever else is going on. Hillary would just have to keep in mind not to act a like a know it all elitist, wouldn't go over well.

I am with you. I wouldn't put it past Donald Chump to find some kind of lame excuse to weasel out of doing the debates.

Donald Trump's ignorance laid bare on foreign and domestic affairs.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/donald-trumps-shocking-ignorance-laid-bare/2016/03/24/b66d2b6c-f1f7-11e5-89c3-a647fcce95e0_story.html?utm_term=.614f3d047bf7

I have been thinking about the moderators, and how much potential effect they might have on a debate, if Trump does show up. What I mean is, it will make a big difference if the mods are the type that will press for an answer, and not accept a glib throwaway line, a jab at the opponent, or some other kind of non-answer. I think the tougher the moderator, the better for Clinton. The softer the mod, the better for Trump.

Maybe Jeremy Paxman could be tempted out of retirement.

You guys keep thinking this... Remind me again how long has it been since Hillary has had a press conference?

Debates ain't press conferences.

Not to mention Hillary and Trump have a completely different campaign strategy. Trump tries and succeeds in getting all the free press he can get and tweets. Hillary and Kaine work on grassroots campaign directly to the people who will vote for her.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election-us-2016-37201836

Besides as long as tRump can't shut up why in the world Hillary even need to speak? If she went too hard on him it might look like she's kicking an imbecile.

If she's too easy he might look less threatening to border line imbeciles.

As much as tRump has flip flopped on immigration, he's basically looks like he's debating himself and it looks like the racist butt-hole won.

Tuesday, Aug 30, 2016 06:59 AM CST
If you can’t beat ’em, malign ’em: Trump’s strategy has shifted to sabotaging Clinton’s eventual presidency

Trump and has backers are feeding the Clinton scandal machine — and the media must not be an accomplice
Heather Digby Parton

If you can't beat 'em, malign 'em: Trump's strategy has shifted to sabotaging Clinton's eventual presidency
Donald Trump; Hillary Clinton (Credit: Reuters/Scott Audette/David Becker/Photo montage by Salon)

The latest beltway gossip (aside from Anthony Weiner’s latest sexcapade) is that Trump and his Trumpettes have shifted their focus from trying to win the presidency to making sure that a Hillary Clinton presidency is a total disaster. Politico’s Edward-Isaac Dovere reports:

The Clinton delegitimization project is now central to Donald Trump’s campaign and such a prime component of right-wing media that it’s already seeped beyond extremist chat rooms into “lock her up” chants on the convention floor, national news stories debating whether polls actually can be rigged, and voters puzzling over that photo they think they saw of her needing to be carried up the stairs.

[…]

Leading Democrats in Washington and beyond recognize Trump’s tactic because they’ve seen it before. President Barack Obama and his allies spent eight years sandbagged by the birth certificate/Bill Ayers/his-middle-name’s-Hussein attacks that all boil down to the same thinking now threatening Clinton: He’s a fake; his presidency either doesn’t count or is a Moorish-style Trojan horse.

Donald Trump certainly remembers it. He was the man who brought “birtherism” mainstream, questioning the president’s basic qualification to be president. And now, most Republicans don’t believe he was born in the US.

Democrats undoubtedly remember that even before Trump flogged that inane conspiracy theory Sen. Mitch McConnell declared that the No. 1 task before the GOP was to make Obama a one-term president and Sen. Jim DeMint promised that health care reform would be his “Waterloo.” Total obstruction followed.
VIDEOBill Clinton: If you want change, vote for Hillary

One would have thought that after the embarrassment of having to ask the candidate’s own brother to manipulate the voting apparatus in Florida in 2000 and then having to call upon Supreme Court Justices who were appointed by their candidate’s father to stop counting votes would have made them think twice but they were not daunted by such hypocrisy. They already knew how successful it would be because this wasn’t the first time these same Republicans had portrayed a Democratic president as illegitimate. They’d done it with Bill Clinton.

In the book, “A Complicated Man: the life of Bill Clinton by those who knew him” the subject was covered by a number of close confidantes and contemporary reporters. Journalist Michael Kinsley observed:

In 1992, there was a feeling among Republicans of Manifest Destiny, that they were supposed to rule forever. At that point they had been in power since 1980 and basically conservatism had been dominant since the 1978 congressional elections. They thought it should go on forever. That is the reason they were so resentful of Clinton. How could he have won? The only explanation is he must have done something terrible. He must have cheated because he wasn’t supposed to win.

Clinton strategist Paul Begala told the author, ‘There was an ongoing effort to delegitimize him. Some on the right refused to call him President Clinton, called him “Mr Clinton” instead.” He recalled that Congressman Dick Armey said on the floor of the House “he’s your president.”

And they used the fact that Clinton won with a plurality due to the Ross Perot candidacy as proof of his illegitimacy despite the fact that all the studies showed he took equally from both parties. On the day after the election Senator Bob Dole announced, “fifty-seven percent of the Americans who voted in the presidential elections voted against Bill Clinton and I intend to represent that majority on the floor of the US Senate.” And so began the eight years of relentless investigations, scandal mongering, obstruction and finally impeachment.

This is how they operate when Democrats hold the White House. When they have a majority they will lean on investigations and “show” votes to delegitimize the moral authority of the president and create chaos and distraction. When they are in the minority they will obstruct everything. In both cases they will work to make the American people see a dysfunctional government that takes their money and offers precious little in return.

If the election were held today, Hillary Clinton would win with less than 50% of the vote. It would be a perfectly legitimate win, as was her husband’s in 1992, Richard Nixon’s in 1968 and Harry Truman, Woodrow Wilson and Abraham Lincoln before her. But I think you can see how that is likely to be interpreted by the Republicans. They no longer assume they are in the midst of a thousand year reign, but they have rationalized that by creating the myth of rampant African American voter fraud and hordes of undocumented immigrants voting illegally. She will not be seen as legitimate.

They were very successful at pushing their juicy narratives of corruption and personal misconduct into the mainstream 20 years ago and with the 24-hour news cycle and social media pressures, the press is even less likely to resist today. This is why you see calls for a special prosecutor and wild claims of treason and illegality. If the Republicans manage to keep control of one or more house of congress, they will have a platform from which to run their scandal circus and their own media will prime the MSM pump.

It’s already happening with the State Department emails which have been gathered by right-wing organizations for the express purpose of feeding the scandal machine. You can see the outlines of how the mutually reinforcing feedback loops works from Sunday’s “Face the Nation” in which Rep. Jason Chaffetz cites a discredited AP report about the Clinton Foundation as proof of corruption and promises thorough investigations in the next congress. Likewise, on “Meet the Press,” in which Clinton’s speech condemning Trump’s incestuous relationship with the alt-right was presented as equivalent to Trump’s incestuous relationship with the alt-right and characterized it as a “race to the bottom.”

There is a bigger concern, however, and one that gets more acute every time this happens. This cynical delegitimizing of the duly elected president ends up delegitimizing our democracy in general. And it’s getting downright dangerous. Trump’s “second amendment” remedy talk and the incessant demands to “lock her up” are taking this way beyond even the political trench warfare of the 1990s and the gridlock of the last eight years. These are barely disguised calls for violence. The political media should be very wary of being used as couriers for that message.

Heather Digby Parton, also known as "Digby," is a contributing writer to Salon. She was the winner of the 2014 Hillman Prize for Opinion and Analysis Journalism.

Hillary is devoting a lot of her research and rehearsal to just needling Trump and trying to get a rise out of him. I thinks that's smart. I've never seen him back down once provoked, and that could be a good way to expose him for the jerk he is.

Trump is an immature, thin skinned, racial bigot, loud mouth, rich guy. I hope the media keeps helping him speak about any subject, because it reveals how ignorant he is. He's contradicted himself about one of his most important issues, immigration. His supporters has got to be confused. But, maybe not, because they are the older and uneducated.

It so sickens me to read these sorts of incidents which have been happening in this election cycle. I am ashamed, embarrassed and saddened and hope and pray (for real) that it is only a temporary phase and all the little rodents crawl back under their rocks after the election. I hope she (?) knows, that kind of attitude is not as prevalent as it may have seemed as it was happening to her.

I've edited it, the original article is too long. There is a link. She does talk about being warmly greeted by people she's met face to face. This behaviour seems to be taking place in cyberspace.

I think the defects of both contending candidates are well known by all here. How a Trump Clinton debate might come out is hard to predict at this point.

Certainly conventional assumptions suggest that Hillary is the accomplished policy wonk, while Trump is merely a thin-skinned marketer given to bombast and outrageous statements. It's also true that Hillary has been an occasionally inept campaigner, particularly in extemporaneous, unplanned situations, and her campaign has carefully kept her from them - and any practice in dealing with them. In contrast Trump has been making an effort to address policy issues and the themes of his campaign in those terms. He has a long way to go in beating Hillary at that game, but he can be very good at offense - and Hillary has a lot to defend.....

It's a safe assumption that both candidates will work on their perceived vulnerabilities, and plans for dealing with both the perceived weakness in their opponent and the strategies each expects the other to mount. How that turns out depends on how wisely and well each of them does that.

I see it as a "no contest" with Hillary's experience and knowledge far superior to anything Trump can come up with.