How Trump Wins the Debate

On one of my first trips to New Hampshire in 1991, to challenge President George H. W. Bush, I ran into Sen. Eugene McCarthy.

He was returning to the scene of his ’68 triumph when he had inflicted the first crippling wound on Lyndon Johnson.

“Pat, you don’t have to win up here, you know,” he assured me. “All you have to do is beat the point spread.”

“Beat the point spread” is a good description of what Donald Trump has to do in Monday night’s debate.

With only a year in national politics, he does not have to show a mastery of foreign and domestic policy details. Rather, he has to do what John F. Kennedy did in 1960, and what Ronald Reagan did in 1980. show, she sets no one on fire. Blacks, Hispanics, and millennials who invested high hopes in Barack Obama seem to have no great hopes for her. She has no bold agenda, no New Deal or New Frontier.

“Why aren’t I 50 points ahead?” wailed Hillary Clinton this week.

The answer is simple. America has seen enough of her and has no great desire to see anymore; and she cannot change an impression hardened over 25 years — in 90 minutes.

But the country will accept her if the only alternative is the Trump of the mainstream media’s portrayal. Hence, the strategy of the Democratic Party for the next seven weeks is obvious:

Trash Trump, take him down, make him intolerable, and we win.

No matter how she performs, though, Donald Trump can win the debate, for he is the one over whom the question marks hang. But he is also the one who can dissipate and destroy them with a presidential performance.

In that sense, this debate and this election are Trump’s to win.

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