Pondering the Pundits

“Pondering the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

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Washington Post Editorial Board: It’s beyond debate that Donald Trump is unfit to be president

Democratic Hillary Clinton and Republican Donald Trump will debate on national television for the first time Monday night, and the stakes could not be higher. The presidency and, by extension, the country’s future — maybe the world’s — could hinge on what they say and how they say it.

Or so we have been told — in breathless pre-event speculation about everything from whether the moderator, NBC’s Lester Holt, will intervene to correct a candidate who strays from the truth, to whether one candidate or the other will be able to goad his or her opponent into a campaign-altering gaffe before an audience expected to reach 100 million.

Permit us to dissent from this conventional wisdom, vigorously. Yes, Monday night’s clash, and two additional debates to follow, will add drama to the election, and a bit more data to the massive pile of it already available to voters. In a fundamental sense, however, there is nothing much at stake, or shouldn’t be, because there is not much more to learn: Mr. Trump has amply demonstrated his unworthiness to occupy the Oval Office. It’s beyond his capacity in the upcoming 90-minute question-and-answer sessions to reverse or even substantially modify that conclusion.

The New York Times Editorial Board: Why Donald Trump Should Not Be President

When Donald Trump began his improbable run for president 15 months ago, he offered his wealth and television celebrity as credentials, then slyly added a twist of fearmongering about Mexican “rapists” flooding across the Southern border.

From that moment of combustion, it became clear that Mr. Trump’s views were matters of dangerous impulse and cynical pandering rather than thoughtful politics. Yet he has attracted throngs of Americans who ascribe higher purpose to him than he has demonstrated in a freewheeling campaign marked by bursts of false and outrageous allegations, personal insults, xenophobic nationalism, unapologetic sexism and positions that shift according to his audience and his whims.

Now here stands Mr. Trump, feisty from his runaway Republican primary victories and ready for the first presidential debate, scheduled for Monday night, with Hillary Clinton. It is time for others who are still undecided, and perhaps hoping for some dramatic change in our politics and governance, to take a hard look and see Mr. Trump for who he is. They have an obligation to scrutinize his supposed virtues as a refreshing counterpolitician. Otherwise, they could face the consequences of handing the White House to a man far more consumed with himself than with the nation’s well-being.

Here’s how Mr. Trump is selling himself and why he can’t be believed.

E. J. Dionne Jr.: Debate moderators shouldn’t duck

I don’t envy Lester Holt. No matter what he does in the first presidential debate, he’ll be denounced. But this certainty should be liberating. If you know the brickbats will come one way or the other, you might as well do the right thing.

But is there a right thing that doesn’t coincide with someone’s political agenda? That is precisely the wrong question, because any choice Holt makes will be interpreted as favoring one candidate over the other. What should matter are the obligations of journalists in a democratic society.

For debate moderators, both on Monday and in future encounters, three duties stand out. The first is to do all they can so viewers come away with an accurate sense of the facts. The second is to promote a real exchange of perspectives between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, not only on issues journalists deem to matter but also on what a president can realistically do to leave the country better off four years from now.

The third is the trickiest: Holt and his colleagues Martha Raddatz, Anderson Cooper and Chris Wallace need to keep in mind that they are far more affluent than most of the people watching the debates. They should think hard about what life is like for those — from Appalachia to Compton, Calif., from the working class in Youngstown, Ohio, to the farm workers in Immokalee, Fla. — who find themselves in less comfortable circumstances than those at the media’s commanding heights.

Lucia Graves: Looking for a Trump metaphor? He’s an autoimmune disease

Donald Trump’s detractors have struggled to define him as long as he’s been on the political scene. But in 2015 it was the famously tongue-tied Rick Perry who landed upon what seemed like the most accurate descriptor to date: he called Trump “a cancer”.
He was speaking in reference to conservatism and, rather amazingly, would later go on to support Trump; he was also on to something. We know how cancer cells evade the body’s natural response by basically disarming the immune system – turning it off or otherwise poisoning it.

But the way this election is shaping up, the better analogy might be an autoimmune disease. Such illnesses result from our body’s natural defenses being marshalled against it with destructive results. Trump is exploiting our political immune system to the detriment and potentially grave peril of the republic. He’s taken what actually makes America great, the systems of government designed to foster public good – the courts, the press, our charity and financial systems – and used them for personal gain at the body politic’s expense.

You don’t have to look far to find examples of Trump using the protective mechanisms of society to undermine it – and perhaps the most conspicuous example of it is the courts.

Amanda Marcotte: Trump’s racist ruse: His farcical outreach to black voters is just white supremacy in disguise

Donald Trump’s “outreach” to black voters is a farce. Luckily, the mainstream media is beginning to clue into the fact that when Trump speaks about black people, the message is about reassuring his white supporters that they aren’t really racist, more than trying to win over black voters. [..]

It hardly bears mentioning that every word of that is a lie. Trump’s poll numbers with black voters are hard to nail down, but overall, they are lower than those of any Republican nominee since 1948.

More importantly, as other journalists have detailed, Trump’s claim that black communities are “in the worst shape they’ve ever been” is flatly a lie.

As President Obama joked, “He missed that whole civics lesson about slavery or Jim Crow.” Even in more recent years, data shows that for black Americans unemployment is down, poverty is down, incomes are up and education levels are rising.

As Zack Beauchamp painstakingly detailed at Vox, Trump supporters are primarily motived by a desire to reassert white male dominance over the culture. So why does Trump even bother with this feigned concern for the well-being of black people?

What he’s really pushing is an old and ugly narrative: Black people are incapable of handling responsibility and therefore need white people to control them. You know, for their own good.