Letters to the Editor: How we the people are letting Trump destroy our democracy Posted on August 6, 2016 by Ed Morrissey
The latest Republican presidential debate focused, unsurprisingly, on the alleged flaws of Hillary Clinton’s candidacy, and her supporters accused the network of turning this into a “gotcha” television event. After the debate, one of the moderators asked the audience how they felt about how Trump was winning this presidential election. The whole audience started shouting “You mean Donald Trump,” and many of the respondents were able to answer that question with confidence. A second moderator asked each audience member if he or she had ever voted for a third-party candidate, and they could get a strong response. Of course, the audience had no way of preventing the question from getting past the obvious question: Do you think they’re going to vote for Trump?
The audience for this debate was almost exclusively conservative, and in an effort to get them to question the veracity of the media narrative that Hillary Clinton is a “career politician” who has “always done a good job of playing the game,” the television network chose to include people like former Republican presidential nominee Jeb Bush and others who have long been among the most ardent supporters of Donald Trump. At this point, the audience should have known that this had nothing to do with them. But the network decided to ask these questions and then make it appear as if it was a question related to the debate, rather than a question about a real election in a real country.
By going around the question, the network allowed the audience to ask questions of their own, and the audience, in turn, could express their own doubts and suspicions about their candidate. When the audience realized that this wasn’t a question about their candidate, they started shouting to make it appear as if they were objecting to the question, and they had to be told to be quiet. A woman in the audience asked, “Why are you asking about Trump?” The host said, “Because there’s a Trump question,” and turned back to the questioner.
In the next segment, the audience