I've been joking on Twitter that maybe Trump is a genius after all, because I don't know who else could have gotten Bill Clinton to wax eloquent for an hour about how sexy his wife is and how important the institution of marriage is; could have gotten the President to give shout-outs to Ted Cruz, coal miners, and the forgotten factory worker; and could have gotten the party as a whole --embodied by Booker, Michele, Biden & Obama-- to be full-throatedly patriotic and demand that no one run the country down.
As Pat Buchanan once said, this week has been the greatest show of cross-dressing I've ever seen. Tho' I guess we have to say the Democratic Party has identified as patriotic this week.
More seriously, in fairness to Trump, I want to throw two things out for consideration.
First, his press conference, the one where he allegedly called for Russia to hack us. He didn't. What he did do was set a trap for the Hillary people to admit that her lost emails contain classified information -- and they utterly fell for it, in an unforced error.
More importantly, just watch it (Curtsy: Ann Althouse). Not saying I agree with every word of it, but I think I could feel comfortable if this version of Donald Trump showed up more often. Not going to say more...just watch and see what you think.
Secondly, here's a pretty robust defense of Trump against the charge that he mocked the handicapped. That accusation has never sat well with me, because I watched Trump defend himself contemporaneously, and I judged him to be sincere, though because I don't trust him, I wasn't sure. Read this. The piece probably makes too much of the fact that the reporter in question does not have cerebral palsy and isn't handicapped in the way Trump gesticulated. What I find persuasive is the 2nd video at the link, where he mocks Ted Cruz with the exact same gesture. It's Trump's way of indicating falling apart or discombobulation, and seeing that cinched for me what I already believed -- that in this one instance, Trump has been maligned, and didn't do the horrible thing we all readily believed of him.
I'm not a convert. I'm not going to pretend Trump is Reagan. But fair is fair.
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