I joined David Drucker of the Washington Examiner to break down the 2nd debate and fallout from the Trump tape. Be sure to listen to Drucker’s talk with Antle and Bonjean, but my part begins at the 28:10 mark.
Perino & Stirewalt: I’ll Tell You What
I took a trip up to the Big Apple to join Dana Perino & Chris Stirewalt preview the debate on the TV spin-off of their excellent podcast (subscribe here.)
Lessons learned:
-JFK is a hike
-Panel work is trickier than it looks
-The answer is always C., Harambe
Looks like the full show has been memory holed, but here’s a clip after the jump.
NBC on Trump’s Backhanded Bill Strategy
NBC’s Benjy Sarlin and Alex Seitz-Wald look at the Trump campaign’s backhanded strategy of tying Hillary Clinton to her husband’s escapades.
His inner circle notably includes several veterans of the 1990s fights with Clinton: Bossie served as a high-profile investigator for House Republicans. Roger Stone, an outside confidant of Trump, has spent years trumpeting obscure conspiracy theories about the Clintons and last year wrote a book called, “The Clintons’ War on Women.” Newt Gingrich, a leading Trump ally, was Speaker of the House during Clinton’s impeachment.
“It’s sort of Ahab and the white whale,” Liam Donovan, a GOP strategist, said. “There are people fighting the old battles like it’s still 1996 when this stuff doesn’t matter to anyone.”
Click here for the full story.
BV: Cruz Invests in Trump’s Bankruptcy
Over at Bloomberg View, Frank Wilkinson looks at Ted Cruz’s decision to cover his convention short, buy high, and double down on $MAGA after the first debate. My take:
Neither Trump nor Cruz has changed. Only the political calculation has.
“Cruz wants be able to say he did all he could, if only to avoid the inevitable recriminations that he undermined the nominee at a key time,” said GOP strategist Liam Donovan, via e-mail. “And even if the Trump primary base isn’t made up of the ideological fellow travelers he thought they were, Cruz world probably still views them as rightfully his in a post-Trump environment.”
Click here for the full column.
Baskets and Media Bias w/ “To The Point”
I joined Warren Olney on KCRW’s “To The Point” public radio show along with the Cleveland Plain-Dealer‘s Henry Gomez, Jonathan Capehart of the Washington Post, and Professor Marc Hetherington from Vanderbilt.