After a weekend of seeming implosion by the GOP nominee and the Republican Party on the heels of the release of a 2005 'hot mic' video tape in which Donald Trump is seen and heard lewdly boasting about sexually assaulting married women and others, he lashed out at Hillary and Bill Clinton on Sunday night, with a press conference (of sorts) featuring women allegedly assaulted by the former President during the 80s and 90s.
All of that and more came up during the 2nd Presidential Debate held on Sunday night at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. I'm joined on today's show for coverage, analysis and insight on what is almost certainly one of the darkest chapters in modern U.S. Presidential political history by former CNN journalist and communications strategist Jacki Schechner and progressive policy advocate Dave Johnson, Senior Fellow at People's Action (formerly: Campaign for America's Future.)
"I feel like there's this feeling of that old story of the frog that's getting warmer and warmer and warmer. Well, we're boiling. And everybody is suddenly noticing that the water's boiling right now," Johnson says in response to my question about how America and the Republican Party have arrived at this point (which I'm more than happy to blame, in no small part, on the corporate media and its decades long failure to report what has been going on in our politics over the last several Presidential Administrations as anything much more than both-sides-do-it politics-as-usual). "This has been coming for a long time. Donald Trump is the Republican Party right now. He's nothing more than the manifestation of something that's been building up and building up, and now we're at a reckoning point," he says.
Schechner notes: "While we think, in the moment, that, 'this will be the straw that breaks the camel's back', the camel gets up again on Monday morning and keeps on trotting. I don't know if it's because of the nature of where we are societally, or if it's just that we've gotten so disgusted with politics, that we're so deep in the mud we can't even see where the mud begins, but we're totally desensitized to where this has gone and where the Republican Party has taken us."
As we struggle to try and make sense of Sunday's debate, Trump's behavior, and where all of this can possibly go from here, Schechner observes: "Trump has been this person his whole life. The Republican Party broke him, they bought him. Clinton herself is a flawed candidate, (but) she's not a sociopath. The problem is that she has to figure out a way to combat him and not get down in the dirt with him, and at the same time mitigate the damage that exists, based on her own somewhat flawed political past."
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