The ‘Trump Train’ derails in the first debate

Remember that we live in a world with two alternative realities: the fact-free world of FAUX News and the conservative media entertainment complex, and everyone else in the reality-based community of “discernible reality.”

Donald Trump is going around telling anyone who will listen that he “won” last night’s debate based upon unscientific and not credible online polls, because FAUX News said so. Online votes declare Trump debate winner, despite media consensus for Clinton.

As Phillip Bump notes at the Washington Post, No matter how garbage the poll, if it shows that Donald Trump won the debate, he’ll endorse it:

These online polls are, again, garbage, no more representative of the population as a whole than is the crowd at a Trump rally.

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A poll you can organize people to participate in is not a poll that is worth citing as fact. Enthusiastic Trump backers will, and no doubt are, pressing people to go vote in these polls to show he won, in the same way they might fill a car with friends to fill a convention hall at a Trump rally. But casting your vote more loudly doesn’t make it worth more, and while enthusiasm may flood an online poll or fill a camera’s viewscreen, it doesn’t tell us much about who will actually win.

There was one poll conducted in the wake of the debate that holds some statistical validity. Accurate polling depends on getting a sample of respondents that is representative of the population whose opinion you’d like to gauge. CNN and its polling partner ORC conducted a poll after the debate that found that Hillary Clinton won easily, by a more than 2-to-1 margin [62 percent of voters thought Clinton won the debate compared to 27 percent for Trump — a 35-point margin]. The sample leaned slightly Democratic, which CNN noted, but it was generally a good snapshot of the views of the American public. FiveThirtyEight notes that CNN’s survey has historically correlated to shifts in the polls. Clinton Won The Debate, Which Means She’s Likely To Gain In The Polls.

A separate post-debate poll from Public Policy Polling found Clinton winning by a narrower margin, 52-40. And historically, it’s the challenging party’s candidate, and not the incumbent’s, who gains after the first debate.

Trump knows that he lost last night’s debate, because he has been blaming everyone for his bizarre performance since he left the stage. The man who actually dared to say last night that “My strongest asset is my temperament” — which drew the loudest belly-laughter at the debate watch party I attended — demonstrated again how serious his lack of self-awareness is this morning. The Morning After the Debate, Donald Trump Goes on the Attack:

Donald J. Trump lashed out wildly on Tuesday in the aftermath of a disappointing first debate with Hillary Clinton, scolding the moderator, criticizing a beauty pageant winner for her physique and raising the prospect of an all-out attack on Bill Clinton’s marital infidelities in the final stretch of the campaign.

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Sounding weary and impatient as he called into a Fox News program, Mr. Trump criticized Lester Holt, the NBC News anchor, for asking “unfair questions” during the debate Monday evening, and speculated that someone might have tampered with his microphone. Mr. Trump repeated his charge that Mrs. Clinton lacked the “stamina” to be president, a claim critics have described as sexist, and suggested that in the future he might raise Mr. Clinton’s past indiscretions.

And defying conventions of civility and political common sense, Mr. Trump leveled cutting personal criticism at a beauty pageant winner, Alicia Machado, whom Mrs. Clinton held up in Monday night’s debate as an example of Mr. Trump’s disrespect for women.

“She was the winner and she gained a massive amount of weight, and it was a real problem,” said Mr. Trump, who was the pageant’s executive producer at the time. “Not only that — her attitude. And we had a real problem with her.”

My late father had a saying, “excuses are like assholes, everyone has one.” Trump is full of excuses and his asshole is Rudy Guiliani. Rudolph Giuliani Says Donald Trump Bit His Tongue Because Chelsea Clinton Was in the Room:

Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former mayor of New York City, one of Mr. Trump’s most ardent supporters and a constant presence on the campaign trail, elaborated on the line of attack that wasn’t used.

He accused Mrs. Clinton of attacking Ms. Lewinsky after she first claimed to be in a relationship with Mr. Clinton, and then said she was “too stupid to be president” because she did not initially believe the former intern. His remarks were recorded on video by a writer for the website Elite Daily and posted to Twitter.

“The president of the United States, her husband, disgraced this country with what he did in the Oval Office and she didn’t just stand by him, she attacked Monica Lewinsky,” Mr. Giuliani said. “And after being married to Bill Clinton for 20 years, if you didn’t know the moment Monica Lewinsky said that Bill Clinton violated her that she was telling the truth, then you’re too stupid to be president.”

Nothing appeals to the women’s vote like blaming a woman for the marital infidelity of her husband, something for which both Donald Trump and Rudy Guiliani have experience.

Guiliani also suggested that the first debate might be the last. Giuliani: I’d skip next debates if I were Trump:

Donald Trump should skip the next two debates unless he gets special guarantees from the moderators, former New York mayor and top Trump adviser Rudy Giuliani told reporters after the debate.

“If I were Donald Trump I wouldn’t participate in another debate unless I was promised that the journalist would act like a journalist and not an incorrect, ignorant fact checker,” Giuliani said. “The moderator would have to promise that there would be a moderator and not a fact checker and in two particular cases an enormously ignorant, completely misinformed fact checker.”

“If you wonder why Donald Trump thinks that the press is a left-wing basically oriented group, Lester Holt proved it tonight,” he added.

He later clarified about future debates: “I didn’t say what I’m advising him, I said what I would do.”

Spoken like the true coward this vile creature is.

Tea-Publicans live in the Epistemic closure and the ‘conservative misinformation feedback loop’ media bubble and God forbid that “discernible realty” and actual facts intrude on their alternate reality.