Nobody told me this was gonna happen!” Trump then squatted down, so that only his head and shoulders appeared above the rostrum, and, continuing the Mini Mike act, squealed, “Nobody told me!” (Bloomberg has since said that he would release three women from their agreements.) “He said, I don’t want to open those agreements. “I said Rosie O’Donnell! It was one of my best answers.” (He had said, inaccurately, that he only used such terms about O’Donnell, with whom he had a long-running feud.)Īfter that debate, in August of 2015, Trump said that Kelly had been angry, with “ blood coming out of her wherever.” Last week, in Nevada, he said of Warren, who had similarly confronted Bloomberg with some of his past quotes about women, “Did you see the anger on her face, that nervous energy? She’s jumping up and down? She’s a mess!” Referring to Warren’s challenge to Bloomberg about the nondisclosure agreements that kept some women from speaking about their experiences at his company, Trump continued, “She said, I got him, I want to see those agreements-you open up those agreements! And this poor guy, he probably signed a hundred of them, and each one’s a disaster.” Trump’s definition of a “poor guy” here is telling. This had been a query in his first debate, from Megyn Kelly, who was then still with Fox News, about the many derogatory terms-“fat pigs,” “dogs,” “slobs,” and “disgusting animals”-he had used when speaking about women. “Remember my first question?” Trump reminisced to the crowd in Las Vegas. If there is a kernel of decent advice in Trump’s indecent counsel, it has to do with directness and perceived consistency. Instead, he was crude, unserious in his proposals, and aggressive-in a word, he stayed in character. In 2016, Trump was running for office for the first time before his first debate, the expectation was that he might flounder in the way that Bloomberg did. One can only hope that the country is looking for an alternative to Trump, and that Trumpian insults are not the way to speed any of the candidates to victory. How much the debates matter for the Democrats may be another question. ![]() The President seems amazed that the Democrats aren’t all calling one another names. and the Party’s abasement of itself before him. And that domination prefigured his takeover of the G.O.P. And yet Trump has something of a point even if he didn’t “win” all the Republican debates, he did, on the whole, dominate them, at least in terms of shaping the tone. “I became President because of the debates, because unlike Mini Mike I could answer questions,” Trump said-a line that might seem delusional if one thinks that, in order to “answer questions,” a person actually needs to give answers, rather than just attack the questioner. At a rally in Colorado, a day before his event in Nevada, he brandished printouts of old press reports touting his debating prowess. This point has been something of an obsession for Trump, who said he had been astonished to hear a guest commentator on Fox News suggest that he had not won the 2016 Republican primary debates. “That’s what they all said! I won,” he boasted. Wouldn’t mind having some, but I happen to have none.” But back to Bloomberg: “Why didn’t he bring that up when she was screaming at him?” Bloomberg didn’t call Warren “Pocahontas” that was why “she won that debate.” The lapse was incomprehensible to Trump, who segued into a stream of reminiscences about how he had won his primary debates during the 2016 campaign. Trump mentioned the testing and, regarding “Indian blood,” told the crowd, “I have none, to the best of my knowledge. She discomfited some Democrats by taking up a challenge from Trump to undergo DNA testing, both because the results showed that any such ancestry she had was distant and, as she has since acknowledged, DNA testing is not how tribal affiliation is determined, anyway. She said she was an Indian!” He was referring to the fraught issue of Warren’s previous claims to Native American ancestry, which she said were based on her family’s oral tradition. Warren, Trump told the crowd, “lied about her own heritage. Then he arrived at what he saw as Bloomberg’s central problem: “Pocahontas screaming at him.” He meant Senator Elizabeth Warren, and he knew just how Bloomberg should respond to her. “He was a beauty-what happened?” Trump clutched his throat and lolled his tongue in a somewhat graphic mime of choking. ![]() ![]() (Bloomberg did not, in fact, stand on a box for the Democratic debate in Nevada.) The crowd cheered on his derision. But first he wanted to remind the crowd of Bloomberg’s height. He was talking about Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire former mayor of New York, for whom he had some advice. “Mini Mike-how’d he do in the debate the other day?” President Donald Trump asked, at a rally in Las Vegas on Friday.
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