The Night Donald Trump Debated Against Himself – And Still Lost (VIDEO)

Still reeling from his catastrophic, vote-losing debate with Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton last week, the Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump experimented last night with a soft version of this Sunday’s debate.

He insisted, though, that it was no such thing. According to The Guardian, he told his audience in Sandown, New Hampshire:

“This has nothing to do with Sunday.”

He even criticized the media for making it appear that it had everything to do with it, saying:

“Even tonight they said ‘Donald Trump is going to New Hampshire to practice for Sunday’ … it’s like they make you into a child.”

However, a child might question what else you would call it, if not a practice session.

He fielded easy, pre-selected pro-Trump questions from a hand picked audience of pro-Trump supporters, read to him by pro-Trump moderator Howie Carr. He also set a timer on his podium to make sure he didn’t go past two minutes per question – the time limit allowed in the real debate.

Yet despite those precautions, he didn’t come out of it well.

First and foremost, he consistently exceeded his two-minute target.

He came up with a bizarre new twist on his complaint that his microphone hadn’t worked properly in the Clinton face-off, and may have been sabotaged. This time, according to the New York Times, he told his bemused audience:

“It wasn’t that the mic didn’t work.”

Instead he blamed the problem on the sound operators, saying they had made his voice “oscillate.”

He managed to alienate yet another electoral group, by saying that Hispanic people in Nevada prefer to be referred to as Latinos. As several commentators including the Huffington Post have noted, this is not the case.

To complete the debacle, he wished the local Red Sox team good luck in their playoff against the Cleveland Indians, apparently forgetting that the Ohio vote could prove crucial to him on November 8.

Instead of taking 20 questions as promised, Trump took only 12, and left the stage after half an hour – scant preparation for the 90 minutes next Sunday’s debate is scheduled for.

As a writer from Vox commented:

“Maybe Trump has been doing secret preparation and the apparently sloppy New Hampshire performance was part of a disinformation campaign to lower expectations.”  

“But at least on the surface it looks like what we’re seeing is that Trump is who we thought he is — a guy with undeniable charisma and television skills who is simply averse to the boring work of preparation and thinking things through. It’s a bad quality in a presidential candidate, but a potentially disastrous one in an actual president.”

Let’s look back on a happier night for Trump in New Hampshire, when he claimed victory in the primary contest for candidacy.

Featured image: screenshot via YouTube video