All the finesse you’d hear in a middle school gym
Hillary Clinton’s thoughts on being bullied on stage by Trump during the second debate:
“This is not okay, I thought,” Clinton said, reading from her book. “It was the second presidential debate and Donald Trump was looming behind me. Two days before, the world heard him brag about groping women. Now we were on a small stage and no matter where I walked, he followed me closely, staring at me, making faces.
“It was incredibly uncomfortable. He was literally breathing down my neck. My skin crawled. It was one of those moments where you wish you could hit pause and ask everyone watching, ‘Well, what would you do?’ Do you stay calm, keep smiling and carry on as if he weren’t repeatedly invading your space? Or do you turn, look him in the eye and say loudly and clearly, ‘Back up, you creep. Get away from me. I know you love to intimidate women, but you can’t intimidate me, so back up.’”
The Post adds:
As The Post’s Sarah L. Kaufman wrote, Trump “paced and rocked and grimaced as spoke; he broke into her time by shouting over her. When she protested that she had not done the same to him, he shot back with all the finesse you’d hear in a middle school gym: ‘That’s ’cause you got nothin’ to say.’
“When it was his turn to speak, Trump got angry, pointed at her, swung his arms around with alarming force.”
His actions were widely mocked and criticized after the debate, and even featured in a “Saturday Night Live” skit that showed him zooming toward an unsuspecting Clinton.
“If a man did that to me on the street … I’d call 911,” political commentator and former Republican strategist Nicolle Wallace said, according to NBC News.
The New York Daily News headline the day after the debate read: “Grab a seat, loser.”
In the post-debate spin room, Clinton surrogates accused Trump of “menacingly stalking” the Democratic nominee. Two body language experts analyzed the debate and concluded Trump was trying to assert his power by roaming the stage while Clinton spoke.
“Trump’s constant pacing and restless movements around the stage attracted attention from Hillary’s words, and visually disrespected her physical presence on the stage, as in ‘I am big, you are small,’ ” David Givens, director of the Center for Nonverbal Studies, a nonprofit research center in Spokane, Wash., told The Post then.
And it worked. He won.
A guy on Twitter says maybe if she’d fought back she would have won.
If @HillaryClinton had turned on @realDonaldTrump in their 2nd TV debate & told him 'Back up you creep', as she wanted, she might have won.
— John Simpson (@JohnSimpsonNews) August 23, 2017
Right…because women telling men to back off is always so universally popular.
Yes, and it always works, too. Like Trump wouldn’t have unleashed a Twitter storm the next morning, and sicced his followers on her.
This is why counterfactual victim blaming is so much fun! If she had done X instead of Y, and it didn’t pay off, then you just say “if you had done Y you would have won!” And if she had done Y and not X, you just say “if you had done X you would have won!”.
John Simpson is a good enough foreign correspondent but he is of the slightly aged English gentleman variety. There are some subjects he has not caught up with yet.
beauvoir’s baby, I think I have seen nearly every conceivable manifestation of that in the past few months; it was always Hillary, and what she did, or didn’t, wore or didn’t, said or didn’t. It couldn’t possibly be 25 years of non-stop hate leveled at her, the increasing crescendo of anger during the campaign (added to by the Bernie supporters), and the subtle and not-so-subtle ways that misogyny shapes our worldview. Nope, none of that. It was her. She did – or didn’t. She was – or wasn’t. She said – or didn’t say. Probably makes the white males who were lukewarm about her and didn’t spend any time supporting her feel better if they can believe that she is to blame for the fact that we now have an ignorant orange crybaby in the White House.
“Did you see how Hillary told Trump off for ‘stalking’ her during the debate? She turned to him and sad, “Hey, back off.” What an angry, irrational bitch! There’s no way in hell I could vote for a man-hating ‘feminist’ like her!”
Maureen, you are always more polite than I.
From what I can tell, Simpson is absolutely unwilling to learn. That seems like a bad trait for a journalist but it is evidently a position he admires. I wish we could have done with these self-indulgent old men deciding what is news on the television. As opposed to self-indulgent old men like me deciding what is news on the internet.
You’re more self-harsh than self-indulgent.
The problem is, it begins to look like we’re trading out the self-indulgent old men for entitled young snowflakes. In the midst of that, there are some good solid news sources, but they don’t shout loud enough to be heard over the angry white men.