Donald Trump begins his reign of fear as described by The New York Times Editorial Board

“Real power is — I don’t even want to use the word —😱😨 fear.”
An echo editorial opinion published in The New York Times by the editorial board. What my own opinion is worth, The New York Times contributed to the Donald Trump reign of fear, because when the editorial board had the chance to support President Joe Biden they newspaer decided to cave to political perceptions rather than defend Biden's many accomplishments.m

Mara Gay, with The New York Times, is complicit in the editorial opinions creating doubt about President Joe Bidens competence and his ability to lead.  At some point in Ms. Mara Gay's life, she will also be challenged by her own age and competence. You can count on it. 

In my opinion, editorial board member Mara Gay was a leader in this wrong minded decision.  So, here we are.....an editorial in the January 17, newspaper.  Who knew? 

Trump's reign of fear begins indoors, inside the Capitol during his inauguration on January 20th.....because the weather is too cold for him to face the nation, the one he intending to destroy.👿

Donald Trump made that remark to the journalists Bob Woodward and Robert Costa in March 2016. Fear is, of course, a favorite tool of the president-elect. He has used it for decades to intimidate opponents, critics and allies to give up, give in or give way. He built his real estate empire through lawsuits and threats against rivals and partners.

He cowed and demolished political opponents through humiliation and invective. He consolidated control of the Republican Party and silenced G.O.P. detractors with pressure tactics and threats to end careers. And as president, he used the power of the office and the power of social media to make life miserable for anyone he chose.

His goal in these efforts has been to push people to check themselves rather than check his power. Now, as he prepares to re-enter the Oval Office, Trump is using fear not only with Congress but also with other essential independent institutions such as courts, business, higher education and the news media. The goal is broadly the same: to deter elected officials, judges, executives and others from exercising their duties in ways that challenge him or hold him accountable. He wants to make dissent so painful as to be intolerable.

America’s leaders and institutions must remain undeterred. They will need to show courage and resilience in the face of Trump’s efforts as they continue to play their unique roles in our democracy. Vigilance is everything: If institutions surrender to the fear and coercion — by bending the knee or by rationalizing that the next right actions aren’t worth the fight, stress or risk — they not only embolden future abuses; they are also complicit in undermining their own power and influence.

The early results suggest reason for concern.

Trump put forward several selections for his cabinet who are unacceptable (❗— Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard, Kash Patel and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — yet there are precious few senators, defense experts, military and intelligence leaders and other principled statesmen on the right who are willing to stand up to the president-elect’s insistence on confirmation.

When one did — Senator Joni Ernst, the Iowa Republican who voiced reasonable concern about Mr. Hegseth’s qualifications to be defense secretary — Trump allies besieged her until getting both of the outcomes Mr. Trump sought: She issued positive comments about Mr. Hegseth and, in doing so, discouraged others from standing up to him in the future.

Chief executives of tech companies seem to have learned the same lesson: After challenging misinformation, hate speech and criticism from Trump and his allies in the first term, several leaders have showered him with public praise and million-dollar donations for his inauguration, with Mark Zuckerberg going as far as nixing Meta’s fact-checking program while shilling for the president-elect by branding the election as a “cultural tipping point.” Ford, G.M., Boeing and other companies have sent money and fleets of cars for the inaugural, hoping to stay on Trump’s good side ahead of his threatened trade wars.

Some of this can be chalked up to people jockeying for personal advantage with a highly transactional president. Some may reflect genuine acceptance that the country has elected a flawed leader to disrupt the status quo. But those sentiments cannot be fully disentangled from the threat posed by Mr. Trump: his determination to get his way by all means necessary, including abusing powers at his disposal to take revenge on those he thinks have crossed him or even just failed to support him in critical moments.

That threat is real: Trump has selected people for top legal and law enforcement positions who have threatened in the past to retaliate against some of those who challenged him. And that is to say nothing of his informal ability to direct troll armies to harass critics. In the absence of leaders across civic life continuing to play their roles — including standing up against illegal and immoral actions when necessary — the acquiescence to fear will free Trump further from the checks and balances that have served our nation so well.

If legislators, for instance, don’t cut back on climate-related spending, he threatened to initiate a constitutional showdown by rescinding the money. His running mate, JD Vance, once suggested that if courts overrule such actions, they may be ignored altogether.💢😓❗ “The chief justice has made his ruling,” Mr. Vance said in 2021, imagining a confrontation with the Supreme Court and quoting a line that Andrew Jackson might or might not have said. “Now let him enforce it.”

Corporate giants with media divisions, such as those controlled by Disney, Comcast and Jeff Bezos, have been distancing themselves from their media assets rather than making a case for traditional accountability journalism that could invite Trumpian retaliation against their broader financial interests. For smaller, less financially secure news organizations, the expense of defending themselves in lawsuits from Mr. Trump and his allies may be enough to encourage self-censorship.

He has picked Pam Bondi to be attorney general and Mr. Patel to lead the F.B.I. and other candidates for positions that are critical to the rule of law — yet who have spoken to varying degrees about prosecuting people who cross Trump. “The Department of Justice, the prosecutors will be prosecuted, the bad ones,” Ms. Bondi said on Fox News in 2023. (In her confirmation hearing this week, Ms. Bondi insisted that “politics will not play a part” in prosecutorial decisions.) Mr. Patel has an enemies list of the so-called deep state and has vowed to “come after” members of the news media “who lied about American citizens.”

Business will face pressure, too. As president, Trump will once again wield enormous influence over regulation, mergers, industrial policy, licensing, tax enforcement and a host of business waivers and outcomes. Chief executives will be under pressure to get with the program on tariff, tax and spending policies rather than speak truth to power about potentially damaging short- or long-term fiscal decisions. Business leaders, economists and academics who were once counted on for expertise and warnings to Congress and in the news media about deficits, trade wars, sanctions and the broad exercise of government power on the economy will be expected to sing from the Trump hymnal.

Trump also used this approach in his engagement with the rest of the world, going beyond his previous declarations that he would no longer fulfill various treaties and international commitments, including those plainly in the American interest, if he doesn’t win concessions. He acts like a bully rather than a constructive leader, threatening allies like Canada and Mexico with heavy tariffs if they don’t stop the flow of drugs and migrants and warning developing nations they would be shut out of the U.S. market if they create a currency to threaten the dollar. He has demanded that Denmark and Panama allow Greenland and the Panama Canal to become American property.

Those actions only undermine our reputation as a trustworthy ally, leading other nations to wonder if they need to hedge against an unpredictable superpower, which would almost certainly undermine our economy, security and cultural influence.

For institutions facing this kind of pressure, we’d urge them to meet the moment with three thoughts in mind.

First, is simply demonstrating conviction by identifying the right thing to do, then showing the courage to pursue that path, even in the face of pressure.

Second is remembering that despite Trump’s transactional nature, no one can count on remaining in his good graces without continued unconditional fealty. (Ask those in his own inner circle who justified or turned a blind eye to misbehavior again and again, only to be cast out for a single episode of standing up to his excesses.) Any advantage gained may be fleeting; any risk overcome may return.

Third is demonstrating faith in the American system, with its remarkable series of checks and balances, with its strong set of rights, with its promise of equal justice.

Sometimes, it means overriding the president’s worst impulses. Republican senators, for example, will probably confirm a vast majority of Trump’s nominees. But that tradition of deference shouldn’t keep them from using their constitutional power to reject those who are dangerous, extreme or unqualified. It was a promising sign that those senators set aside Mr. Trump’s threat to make recess appointments and told him that Matt Gaetz could not be confirmed as attorney general, leading to his withdrawal from consideration. They should take the same stand on Mr. Hegseth, Ms. Gabbard, Mr. Patel and Mr. Kennedy.

Sometimes resiliency will mean going to court and being forced to spend money to resist improper directives from the administration.

That’s what publishers and news executives have to do to continue investigative and accountability reporting when it draws legal action from Trump. (Small and nonprofit news organizations will need help finding the resources to fight government challenges and complex defamation suits.) When Trump files baseless lawsuits out of pure vengeance, as he did recently against The Des Moines Register over a poll showing him trailing Kamala Harris in Iowa, publishers will have to summon every resource to fight such abuses of the legal system.

That’s what governors will have to do if a federal official or agency demands their state use local law enforcement to round up migrants for deportation through illegal or unconstitutional means or reduce access to voting in ways that violate voting rights, civil rights or other laws. And if state prosecutors find that federal officials are violating the law, they shouldn’t hesitate to file criminal charges.

Challenging Trump in federal court proved to be a useful tactic during his first term. Federal courts routinely blocked some of his first administration’s worst policies; one study showed that he lost nearly 80 percent of the time when civil lawsuits were filed against his agencies’ rule making. For example, when he ordered an end in 2020 to the diversity-visa lottery program, he was sued by immigrant-rights lawyers, and a federal judge upheld the program, which stayed in place past Joe Biden’s election.

Even as leaders prepare to hold fast under pressure, they would benefit from some meditation on the anger and mistrust that helped make the Trump era possible.

Americans have lost their patience with the status quo and their faith in the ability of many institutions — including public health agencies, financial and business institutions, the Democratic Party, the courts, elite universities and, yes, the news media — to improve their lives and communities. In playing their unique roles in our democracy, institutions should also be wary of falling into a reflexive resistance posture, in which everything Mr. Trump proposes is implicitly wrong or dangerous or in which any tactics to oppose him are implicitly right and virtuous.

During Trump’s four years in office, the country saw that many of his fulminations fell apart when brave politicians or lawyers or ordinary citizens simply said no. America must see through the fear again. This is not the time to feel resigned to the old Trump tactics or be cowed by his threats and insinuations.

This country and its principles are too vital to sacrifice anything in the interest of going along when Trump huffs and puffs. 

America will stand strong as long as people stand up for it. There’s no reason to surrender or get a foreign passport or move to Canada. Those on his so-called enemies list shouldn’t be begging for pre-emptive pardons. Such moves only reward his abuses and even legitimize them.

DonOLD Trump is unfit to lead. Do not vote for this political monster! But please VOTE!

The New York Times Editorial Board
Vote🗳️ to End the Trump Era

You already know Donald Trump. He is unfit to lead. Watch him. Listen to those who know him best. He tried to subvert an election and remains a threat to democracy. He helped to overturn Roe vs Wade, with terrible consequences. Trump’s corruption and lawlessness go beyond elections: It’s his whole ethos. He lies without limit. If he’s re-elected, the G.O.P. won’t restrain him. Trump will use the government to go after opponents. 

He will pursue a cruel policy of mass deportations. He will wreak havoc on the poor, the middle class and employers. Another Trump term will damage the climate, shatter alliances and strengthen autocrats. Americans should demand better. Vote❗🗳️

Debt ceiling debate- arguing the same issue over and over but somehow expecting a different result

Although this overquoted phrase, attributed to Einstein, is classic cliché, the metaphor nevertheless meets the political moment when Republicans keep trying to fight the debt limit debate over and over and over but somehow expect a different result!

Republicans and Debt: Blackmailers Without a Cause

Opinion echo by columnist Paul Krugman published in The New York Times:

Stop me if you’ve heard this before: Two years after a Democratic president took office and pushed ambitious policies through Congress, Republicans have regained control of the House. They don’t have the votes required to repeal the president’s achievements, but a quirk of U.S. law — which requires that Congress vote a second time to authorize the borrowing that results from already enacted spending and tax legislation — seems to give them an opportunity to engage in blackmail, threatening to create a financial crisis unless their demands are met.

Actually, however, you haven’t heard this before. True, there are some parallels with the debt ceiling crisis of 2011. 

But there are also huge differences. Elite opinion has changed — the debt obsession that gripped Very Serious People in the media and beyond a dozen years ago has vanished. Democrats also seem made of sterner stuff, much more determined to resist extortion.

But the most important difference is that this time Republicans aren’t making coherent demands. It’s completely unclear what, if anything, they want in exchange for not blowing up the economy. At this point they’re blackmailers without a cause.

Some of the reporting I’ve seen on the debt standoff describes Republicans as unable to agree on which spending should be cut. This might give the impression that there are factions within the G.O.P. that have different priorities. But as far as I can tell, no influential players within the party are advocating anything that might make a significant dent in the budget deficit, let alone achieve the balanced budget Kevin McCarthy promised as part of the deal that made him speaker.

"...dangerous when a political party is willing to burn things down unless it gets its way..." Krugman.

As always, the fundamental fact about the budget is that the federal government is basically an insurance company with an army. 

Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and the military dominate spending, and it’s impossible to do much about deficits unless you either raise taxes — which is obviously not part of the G.O.P. playbook — or make major cuts to these programs.

In the past, Republicans did try to change safety net programs in ways that would in effect have amounted to major cuts. 

George W. Bush tried to privatize Social Security. Republicans almost made a deal with President Barack Obama that would have reduced Social Security cost of living adjustments and raised the age of Medicare eligibility. In 2017, Paul Ryan, speaker of the House at the time, declared that he had been “dreaming” of cutting Medicaid since his college days. (Maine Writer:  hypocritical Paul Ryan who grew up in a home where his mother benefited from Social Security widows benefits!)

But the G.O.P., perhaps remembering the political backlash after Donald Trump tried to dismantle Obamacare, has since become much more cautious. McCarthy has already declared that cuts to Social Security and Medicare are “off the table”; if his party ever gets around to making specific proposals, it will find out that Medicaid, which covers even more Americans than Medicare, is also extremely popular, even among Republicans.

Nor is political caution the only reason Republican leaders have become reluctant to attack the safety net. The G.O.P. base has also lost interest in spending cuts, turning its attention to culture wars. As my colleague Nate Cohn recently noted, in early 2021, far more Republicans reported having heard about a decision to stop publishing some of the Dr. Seuss books than about President Biden’s $1.9 trillion spending bill.

Inevitably, some Republicans are trying to make the budget a culture-war issue, claiming that large sums can be saved by eliminating “woke” spending. But what spending are they talking about? (Oh paaaalzeee! 😖)

I’ve been trying to find specific examples of federal outlays that conservatives consider woke*, bearing in mind that right-wing think tanks and politicians have a strong incentive to find big-ticket items that sound outrageous. The results of my search were, well, embarrassing. 

For example, the spending listed in a Heritage Foundation report thundering against “woke earmarks” totaled about $19 million — less than the federal government spends every two minutes.

So the bottom line on the debt crisis is that there is no bottom line: Republicans denounce excess spending, but can’t say what spending they want to cut. Even if Democrats were inclined to give in to extortion, which they aren’t, you can’t pay off a blackmailer who won’t make specific demands.

Unfortunately, the emptiness of Republican fiscal posturing is no guarantee that we’ll avoid a debt crisis. If anything, it may make a crisis more likely. MAGA may lack policy ideas, but it’s rich in nihilism; Republicans don’t know what policies they want, but they definitely want to see Biden fail.

So far, the Biden administration’s strategy seems to be to flush Republicans out of hiding, force them to propose specific spending cuts, then watch them retreat in the face of an intense public backlash. There are also, I presume and hope, contingency plans to avoid crisis if this strategy fails.

But it’s hard not to be worried. It’s dangerous when a political party is willing to burn things down unless it gets its way; it’s even more dangerous when that party just wants to watch things burn.

*Woke:  The meaning of WOKE is aware of and actively attentive to important societal facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice).

When election losers make bigger headlines than the winners!

November's nick name of the month:

Meet Ron DeSanctimonious

The Republicans’ Post-Midterm Reckoning with Donald Trump

Will the era of Stop the Steal—and the G.O.P.’s overt challenges to democracy—finally start to recede?

November 13, 2022 Echo essay published in The New Yorker, by Benjamin Wallace-Wells. 

Savvy sportswriters know that the dramas are often richer in the losing team’s locker room, but, no matter how crushing the defeat, the shortstop does not usually try to assault the second baseman. One cannot say the same about the post-midterm atmosphere among Republicans. Within hours of the G.O.P.’s dismal failure to produce a “red wave,” the knives were out for the Party’s presumed leader. “Republicans have followed Donald Trump off the side of a cliff,” David Urban, one of the ex-President’s former advisers, told the Times. On Twitter, Jacqui Heinrich, a White House correspondent for Fox News, quoted a Republican source as saying, “If it wasn’t clear before it should be now. We have a Trump problem.”

The specific gripe that these Republicans have with Trump is not of a moral or a legal nature. The problem, in their eyes, is that Trump effectively handpicked the candidates who underperformed in some of the country’s most crucial races. Many of these duds had won Trump’s favor for only one reason: fealty to a lie. As Chris Christie put it, “The only animating factor [for Trump] in determining an endorsement is ‘Do you believe the 2020 election was stolen or don’t you?’ ” This loyalty test led Trump to back a huckster doctor (Mehmet Oz, in Pennsylvania); a foggy ex-football star who supported a nationwide ban on abortion yet allegedly pushed former paramours to have the procedure (Herschel Walker, in Georgia); and a young venture capitalist who proved susceptible to dorm-room musings about the wisdom of the Unabomber (Blake Masters, in Arizona). On the morning after the election, Trump reportedly lashed out at people in his circle who he says advised him to back the likes of Oz—including his wife, Melania. What a guy.

Democrats have been through enough of these cycles to be a little jaded. Republicans are forever stomping around, insisting that they’ve had enough of Trump’s excesses, only to get over it and once again line up behind him. Why should this time be any different? The best reason to think that it will—really, the only reason—is that now there is an alternative. “defuture” was the enormous headline on the front page of Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post on Wednesday. It ran, of course, with a photograph of a smiling Ron DeSantis, the resoundingly reëlected governor of Florida. If that headline was too subtle, the Post followed it the next day with a front-page cartoon of Trump teetering on the top of a wall: “trumpty dumpty.” From Fox News to Trumpworld itself, the loyalists were fleeing. As the results came in on CBS, Mick Mulvaney, Trump’s former chief of staff, said, “DeSantis wins tonight and Trump is not doing very well.”

The postmortems are still accumulating, but they already suggest a pattern. The Republicans had no trouble turning out their base. Their struggle was in winning over the independent voters who customarily reject the party in power. And this time around the G.O.P. had enormous advantages, from the high rate of inflation to the low popularity ratings of the sitting President. According to Nate Cohn, of the Times, Republican candidates fared poorly in places where abortion rights were on the ballot, and in places where the Party’s candidates had backed Trump’s challenges to the election. (Democrats also made much of Republican plans to weaken Medicare and Social Security.)

It was evident, the electoral problem was simple: the Republicans were too extreme, and not just on one issue.

DeSantis’s ascent on the national scene is a reflection of his political success in Florida: having won the 2018, governor’s race by some thirty-three thousand votes, he was reëlected on Tuesday by a margin of more than a million, turning a state nearly as populous as Australia from purple to convincingly red. He made significant gains among Hispanic voters and, perhaps most alarmingly for Democrats, won Miami-Dade County, traditionally a Democratic stronghold. But it’s hard to see what solution he would offer to the extremism problem. DeSantis, like the ex-President, is a steadfast culture warrior—and he shares Trump’s willingness to use cruelty as a political weapon. It was DeSantis, after all, who tricked migrants in Texas into boarding a plane and being sent off to Martha’s Vineyard. The seeming shift in enthusiasm from the former President to DeSantis suggests that many Republicans intend to replace one cult of personality with another, to move away from Trump, and his particular fixations, without altering the nature of Trumpism.

That is a cynical kind of choice.

But in one important way it might also signal some small progress. The glimmer of hope in this election lies in the scattered indications that the era of Stop the Steal, and the Republican Party’s overt challenges to democracy, may be receding. 

Quietly, even the most ostentatious election deniers who lost on Tuesday promptly conceded defeat. DeSantis doesn’t much differ from Trump politically, but he has declined to say that the 2020, election was stolen.

You can trace the effects of the midterms on Presidential politics by observing who is acting relaxed and who is anxious. At a press conference on Wednesday, Joe Biden, who turns eighty this month, was positively ebullient. DeSantis merely basked in what he called “a win for the ages.” Trump, on the other hand, exhibited a frenzied urgency. Republican officials, including Kevin McCarthy, who seems likely to become the next Speaker of the House, had reportedly talked Trump out of declaring a 2024, Presidential bid on the night before the midterms. Instead, Trump announced an announcement: a major speech that he says he’ll make at Mar-a-Lago on November 15th. Later in the week, as Hurricane Nicole threatened Palm Beach County, Trump wrote a post on Truth Social, the platform he founded after he was banned from Twitter, sniping at the Murdoch-owned outlets that seemed to be “all in for Governor Ron DeSanctimonious, an average REPUBLICAN Governor with great Public Relations.”

That DeSantis has become a Trump fixation makes sense. One political truism holds that, at any given time, only two people in politics really matter: the President, and whomever the President is arguing with. For more than half a decade, Trump has been one of those two people. Now he has a challenger. ♦

Published in the print edition of the November 21, 2022, issue, with the headline “Fall Guy.”

Support Social Security against the Republican plan to take this important benefit away from beneficiaries

"we share the alarm of President Biden and Barack Obama at proposals from leading Republican senators to terminate the hitherto unbreakable guarantee of benefits under both Social Security and Medicare"

August 14, 1935 - The Social Security Act was signed into law by President Roosevelt on August 14, 1935. In addition to several provisions for general welfare, the new Act created a social insurance program designed to pay retired workers age 65 or older a continuing income after retirement.

Echo letter to the editor of The New York Times:

Re “G.O.P. Signals Plans to Shrink Social Security” (front page, of the NYT, on Nov. 3):

Your article discussing the partisan wrangling over Republicans’ plans for (spiking!) Social Security and Medicare is missing an important piece — discussion of a viable solution other than cutting benefits.

As descendants of the creators of Social Security — F.D.R.; his vice president Henry A. Wallace; his labor secretary, Frances Perkins; and his commerce secretary Harry Hopkins — we share the alarm of President Biden and Barack Obama at proposals from leading Republican senators to terminate the hitherto unbreakable guarantee of benefits under both Social Security and Medicare — benefits earned by a lifetime of payroll taxes taken out of every paycheck.

Yes, both programs face solvency challenges. But, there is an obvious solution other than curbing benefits: Eliminate the cap on the amount of income that is subject to the payroll tax — currently $147,000 — which ridiculously favors the wealthy. A C.E.O. who earns $10 million pays less than 0.01 percent, an incomprehensible injustice to a nurse paying 6.2 percent.

We understand the toxicity of tax increases in this political season. So let us fervently channel our politically savvy ancestors. To honor the promises made generations ago to American workers, make today’s wealthiest pay the same payroll tax rate as everybody else.

Henry Scott Wallace
Jim Roosevelt Jr.
Tomlin Perkins Coggeshall
June Hopkins

Where's the hope? Republicans stoke politics of fear

Remember the nostalgic political President Reagan days?  Back in those days, politicans talked about "Morning in America".  

In fact, "Morning in America" was the name of a political campaign television commercial, viewed during the 1984 U.S. presidential campaign of Republican Party candidate (elected) Ronald Reagan. It featured images of Americans going to work and a calm, optimistic narration that suggested improvements to the U.S. economy

Sadly, times have changed! Now, fear is the prevailing political emotion..

So, what would President Reagan do, today? In my opinion, although the late 40th President isn't here to defend himself, I suspect he'd revet to  beoming a Democrat  (as he was before he became Republican)! In my opinion, President Reagan would get the Republicans out of the ugly quaqmire they've sunk into as a result of being unable to create a salient political message of hope and optimism. As a result of a lack of inspiring political leadership, a scary number of voters are falling victims to the politics of fear. 

Presidential candidate Donald Trump (a.k.a. "Trump the Chump") has raised fear to a hypnotic political emotion. Trump's ability to take all the media oxygen out of the news has exacerbated fear and, or course, he's hypnotizing the media, too.  Trump "the Chump" created fear of Mexicans (he said "they're rapists!"), against immigrants (he'll build a wall to prevent them from entering the USA), against the disabled, against women who menstruate and, now, he's even politicized certain Yiddish language profane words. There's not much left for "Trump the Chump" to be against; but whatever's still out there, he's against it.

In contast to Republican fear stoking, the Democrats are advancing progressive ideas. In other words, Democrats are clearly contrasting the Republicans' doom and gloom with uplifting and inspiring concepts....like, for example, health care for all (universal health care) and financial retirement security by protecting Social Security and loan relief for student debt.

Democrats are promoting a civil discourse in their "debates", especially when compared to the Republican right wing extremism. At the December 19th, Democratic candidates debate in Las Vegas, Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton and Martin O'Malley conducted a discussion, in contrast to their rivals' Republican insult debacle.

David Remmick reports in October 26, 2015, The New Yorker, how history may look back on the Las Vegas debate as the event that elevated Mrs. Hillary Clinton to the Democratic nomination for the 2016, presidential campaign. One debate will not erase what many voters see as some linering perceptions about Mrs. Clinton's detractions, like her lawyerly slipperiness under questioning, the walled garden of her political circle and other characterizatios created by political cartoonists. Yet, Mrs. Clinton's debate achievement accentuated the salient politcal problem in the 2016 campaign. In other words, she attacked her chief rivals, who aren't her party competitors. Instead, she looked beyond Senator Sanders and Governor O'Malley, but attacked the Republicans. 

Indeed, even if there may have been some flaws in Mrs. Clinton's debate appearence, she did succeed in accentuating the chaos and the "intellectual barreness and general collapse of their rivals in the Republcian Party," wrote Remmick.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump will say anything racist, or anything "funny", to terrify voters or rile them, or amuse them, depending on the moment.  

In political terms, Democrats must sense the Las Vegas debate events with confidence. In the debate, Mrs. Clinton was clear about who her enemies are - and they're "the Republcians". 
Nevertheless, in spite  of Republicans' political fear stoking, the reports about the death of the radical right are premature.  

In 2016, unfortunately, the G.O.P. are still likely to hold a majority in the House of Represenaties. In other word, political obstructionism will continue, in spite of the Democratic will to create optimism, or as the Republican Reagan would say, "Morning in America".  

Sadly, it sure looks like the political war will continue, because, within the G.O.P., the politics of perpetual fear will go on corroding, not just a political party, but our nation.

America needs a candidate who inspires hope. Let's create a landslide victory for Mrs. Hillary Clinton, in the 2016 presidential election!