Wiretap: Debate post-mortem, Wells Fargo and other fallout

Lashing out

It was the day after the miserable night before and Donald Trump was blaming the mic, the moderator and doubling down on why he called a Miss Universe winner “Miss Piggy.” In other words, it was just another day on the campaign trail. Via The New York Times.

 

True colors

Adam Gopnik writes in The New Yorker that Donald Trump’s bad night had nothing to do with his debating skills. It wasn’t that he gave a bad performance, Gopnik says, but that he’s a bad man.

 

The debate trap The Donald fell for

Because Donald Trump is Donald Trump, he fell into the Alicia Machado trap that Hillary Clinton had laid for him. And because he’s Donald Trump, he can’t seem to find a way out. Via Vox.

 

“He is who he is”

Dan Balz: That was the real Donald Trump who showed up for the Hofstra debate. The question now is whether Republicans can live with that? Via The Washington Post.

 

A chill down the spine

From the right, David French writes in The National Review how Trump showed in the debate just how dangerous he would be as president. As French says, “A loud ignorant man is still ignorant.”

 

“A catastrophic media failure”

From the left, Brian Beutler writes in The New Republic that the debate proved what we already knew – that Trump is a monster – and blames the media for anyone who didn’t already understand that.

 

Election reconsidered

The movie, Election, has always been on some level about the life of Hillary Clinton. But watching it again in 2016, 17 years after it was released, you may see Tracy Flick – and Clinton – in an entirely different way. Via New York magazine.

 

A hawk and a dove

Shimon Peres, among the last of Israel’s founding generation, dies at 93. Peres was as responsible as anyone for building Israel’s military might, but he was also a leader in trying to find a way toward peace with the Arabs. Via The New York Times.

 

Wells Fargo fallout

And so someone from the banks will finally have to pay. Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf agreed to forfeit $41 million in performance pay after the bank fired 5,300 low-level employees for doing sham deals. On the other hand, Stumpf presumably still has the $161 million he was paid over the five years in which the misconduct took place. Via The Washington Post.

Flickr photo courtesy of Steve Snodgrass

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