Month: September 2016

“As of November 9, there will be a bloodbath at Fox”

by Gaius Publius

I couldn’t help circling back to this.

Thanks to a great heads-up by digby, I took time to read Gabriel Sherman’s excellent New York Magazine piece, “The Revenge of Roger’s Angels: How Fox News women took down the most powerful, and predatory, man in media,” from start to finish in one sitting. I strongly recommend you do the same — it’s an excellent example of investigative journalism as well as investigative writing. The piece is a page-turner, and it’s very well written.

There’s too much information in it to capture here, but near the end there’s a section that discusses what Fox becomes post-Ailes, and I’d like to focus on that. If Sherman is right on both of his counts — about the changes at Fox, about the emergence of Trump TV — the media landscape will drastically change post-election.

Will that change be for the better? That’s a consideration for another time.

Fox After Ailes

On what Fox is about to become, Sherman writes:

Ailes’s ouster has created a leadership vacuum at Fox News. Several staffers have described feeling like being part of a totalitarian regime whose dictator has just been toppled. “No one knows what to do. No one knows who to report to. It’s just mayhem,” said a Fox host. As details of the Paul, Weiss [a law firm] investigation have filtered through the offices, staffers are expressing a mixture of shock and disgust. The scope of Ailes’s alleged abuse far exceeds what employees could have imagined. “People are so devastated,” one senior executive said. Those I spoke with have also been unnerved by [senior executive VP Bill] Shine and [Fox general counsel Dianne] Brandi’s roles in covering up Ailes’s behavior.

Despite revelations of how Ailes’s management team enabled his harassment, Murdoch has so far rejected calls — including from [Murdoch’s son] James, according to ­sources — to conduct a wholesale housecleaning. On August 12, Murdoch promoted Shine and another Ailes loyalist, Jack Abernethy, to become co-presidents of Fox News. He named Scott executive vice-president and kept Brandi and [PR department executive Irena] Briganti in their jobs. Fox News’s chief financial officer, Mark Kranz, is the only senior executive to have been pushed out (officially he retired), along with [Ailes’s longtime executive assistant Judy] Laterza and a handful of assistants, contributors, and consultants. “Of course, they are trying to isolate this to just a few bad actors,” a 21st Century Fox executive told me.

Many people I spoke with believe that the current management arrangement is just a stopgap until the election. “As of November 9, there will be a bloodbath at Fox,” predicts one host. “After the election, the prime-time lineup could be eviscerated. O’Reilly’s been talking about retirement. Megyn could go to another network. And Hannity will go to Trump TV.” …

Meanwhile, the Murdochs are looking for a permanent CEO to navigate these post-Ailes, Trump-roiled waters. According to sources, James’s preferred candidates include CBS president David Rhodes (though he is under contract with CBS through 2019); Jesse Angelo, the New York Post publisher and James’s Harvard roommate; and perhaps a television executive from London. Sources say [Murdoch’s son] Lachlan, who politically is more conservative than James, wants to bring in an outsider. Rupert was seen giving Rebekah Brooks a tour of the Fox offices several months ago, creating speculation that she could be brought in to run Fox. Another contender is Newsmax CEO Chris Ruddy.

You may remember the name Rebekah Brooks from the U.K. phone-tapping scandal (emphasis added):

Brooks was a prominent figure in the News International phone hacking scandal, having been the editor of the News of the World when illegal phone hacking was carried out by the newspaper. Following a criminal trial in 2014 she was cleared of all charges by a jury at the Old Bailey, which accepted her defence of incompetence: that she had no knowledge of the illegal acts carried out by the newspaper she edited.[8]

In September 2015, Brooks was confirmed as CEO of News UK, the renamed News International, re-establishing the working relationship with News Corp founder and chairman Rupert Murdoch.

O”Reilly, Hannity, Megyn Kelly and more, all could be gone from Fox News after the election. It will be interesting to watch Fox reinvent itself as the competitor to what may be a network to its right, Trump TV, a network perhaps run by the attack dog, Roger Ailes, who turned Fox into what it used to be.

Trump TV

Trump TV, if it emerges after the election, will throw a spanner into the workings of a once unified right-wing (and alt-right) messaging ecosystem:

The prospect of Trump TV is a source of real anxiety for some inside Fox. The candidate took the wedge issues that Ailes used [in order] to build a loyal audience at Fox News — especially race and class — and used them to stoke barely containable outrage among a downtrodden faction of conservatives. Where that outrage is channeled after the election — assuming, as polls now suggest, Trump doesn’t make it to the White House — is a big question for the Republican Party and for Fox News.

As right-wing as they are, both Trump and Murdoch care about the money that goes to the most-watched media outlets. They’re about to become competitors for it:

Trump had a complicated relationship with Fox even when his good friend Ailes was in charge; without Ailes, it’s plausible that he will try to monetize the movement he has galvanized in competition with the network rather than in concert with it. Trump’s appointment of Steve Bannon, chairman of Breitbart, the digital-media upstart that has by some measures already surpassed Fox News as the locus of conservative energy, to run his campaign suggests a new right-wing news network of some kind is a real possibility.

And notice this tidbit, a hint of the infighting to come:

One prominent media executive told me that if Trump loses, Fox will need to try to damage him in the eyes of its viewers by blaming him for the defeat.

A battle for the eyes of the “deplorables” (an unfortunate, though interesting word) between Fox News and Trump TV — as well as for eyes and minds of the non-deplorable segment of the Trump-supporting world — should be fascinating to watch. One hopes they split the pie as they knife-fight to own it. I’d rather see an electorally divided “deplorables” than to see that group united, no matter how weakened their numbers.

As to the non-deplorable portion of Trump supporters — those suffering from the economic ravages of both pro-wealth Democratic rule and pro-wealth Republican rule — perhaps a newly populist Democratic Party can attract them for a change.

Again, if you can spare the time, do read the whole thing. It’s fascinating, incredibly lurid, and very well documented. If sexual office politics is your cup of tea, you’ll drown in it. Fox News was a pit of predatory males, office women retained and passed around for sex, and mid-to-upper-level executives (of both sexes) who acted as procurers — “talent scouts” — to feed one toxic man’s toxic need, along with the needs of those around him. Some of those needs were simply to survive in that kind of environment.

And Ailes? He’s still at it, reportedly advising Trump as we speak. Lord help us.

(A version of this piece appeared at Down With Tyranny. GP article archive here.)

GP
 

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Aw, sh#t… here we go.
by Tom Sullivan

I was just about to comment on a post at Raw Story when another headline there grabbed my attention. And what an appropriate lead-in:

If you want to avoid the new Dark Ages: Get out and vote

But the first headline at Raw Story was about Donald Trump advisor Gen. Michael Flynn on Meet the Press yesterday taking issue with Mark Cuban being invited to tonight’s presidential debate:

In response [to] the news that Cuban will attend the first presidential debate of the 2016 general election, Trump tweeted over the weekend that he may invite Gennifer Flowers, who allegedly had an affair with Hillary Clinton’s husband decades ago.

On Sunday, Flynn deflected questions from NBC’s Chuck Todd about the invitation to Flowers.

“I would just go with what you have seen,” Flynn said. “And we’ll wait to see what happens tomorrow night.”

“Was it appropriate to invite Mark Cuban?” the Trump adviser continued. “I mean, he’s not a legitimate person. Why is he invited?”

First they came for Mark Cuban, etc.

Donald Trump’s political career grew out of his deciding Barack Obama was “not a legitimate person.” That mindset seems to have filtered down to his mouthpieces. Imagine a Trump administration populated with Trumps, Trumpettes, and Michael Flynns empowered to decide on a whim which Americans are illegitimate.

It wasn’t that long ago conservatives joked about bringing back the Dark Ages:

Conservatives have invited 3,000 right-leaning luminaries to a New Year’s retreat in Florida intended to rival the annual Renaissance Weekend in Hilton Head, S.C., attended by friends of President Clinton. The conservatives, those wags, are calling theirs the Dark Ages Weekend.

The letter of invitation, topped by a black dragon logo, seeks to rally conservatives at the posh Doral Golf Resort in Miami to sharpen their blades for the fight to slay that common enemy of all Americans — the “big, fat and unaccountable” federal government.

Other common enemies would come later, one supposes. Except back then, the conservative elite felt they got to decide who was or was not illegitimate. Now, with Bravehair off script and leading commoners in revolt, the conservative elite are not so glib. They are Illegitimati. And Mark Cuban. And you’re next.

Michael Flynn may unwittingly have given the game away. As Tom Arnold said in True Lies,
“Aw, sh#t… here we go.”

If They Don’t Compare, Don’t Compare Them

by tristero

Today, Nicholas Kristof said something very true:

Frankly, we should be discomfited that many Americans have absorbed the idea that Hillary Clinton is less honest than Donald Trump, giving Trump an edge in polls of trustworthiness. 

Hello? There is no comparison.

And then he proceeded to compare the two:

One commonly cited example of Clinton’s lying is her false claim in 2008 that when she was first lady she came under sniper fire after her plane landed in Bosnia. In contrast, with Trump, you don’t need to go back eight years: One examination found he averages a lie or an inaccuracy in every five minutes of speaking.

EEEEEAAAAAGH (pounding head on desk)!!!!!!!

Well, let’s give him some credit for improving. In a recent earlier column, he wrote:

Clearly, Clinton shades the truth — yet there’s no comparison with Trump.

And then he compared Clinton to Trump seven times.

Why does this matter? Because this construction creates a rhetorical equality. It doesn’t matter who is the more egregious liar. What people take away is the comparison, not the details. Add together the fact that Trump is getting literally double the headline and photo coverage of Clinton with the fact that despite what he says, Kristof behaves as if they actually are comparable (like nearly everyone else in the media) and you’ve got a recipe that all but guarantees a dangerously close election.

And it’s coming.

Who IS this white guy?

by digby

Just this. I know everyone wants to vote for someone for whom they feel great affinity. I hope that happens for everyone at least once in their life. It’s kind of a rare thing. But when someone like Trump comes along it’s important to take a stand against what he stands for. This guy says it well:

POWERFUL VIDEO: Who IS this white guy??? https://t.co/eP0bsxTGSf via @youtube –#NeverTrump

— Van Jones (@VanJones68) September 25, 2016

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Equality isn’t here yet

by digby

Greenberg poll (D) only has Clinton up ONE pt (!) over Trump w white millennials, 33-32%. Wow.

— Josh Kraushaar (@HotlineJosh) September 23, 2016

He forgot to note that Obama lost white millennials by 7 in 2012. But hey, who needs perspective, amirite?

This raises an issue I think people need to be a little bit more aware of. When we talk about millennials becoming less racist, which is true, it’s important to be aware of the fact that it’s mostly because they’re becoming less white.

I know baby boomers are the worst people in the history of mankind, but when it comes to race, you have no idea what it was like dealing with our parents. The generation gap was real and it was vicious.

And there’s this, too which probably has to do with the deeply embedded primal nature of sexism, I’m sorry to say:

Men aged 16-29 are more likely to hold traditional attitudes towards gender roles than older men, a new study has found.

35 per cent of young men were shown to believe that the man should assume the role of primary earner whilst the woman should remain home – shouldering the responsibilities of childcare, cooking and cleaning.

In comparison, only 26% of men aged 30-44, and 21% of men aged 45 and over, shared these views.

And this, from Harvard Business review:

Millennials, those Americans now between 16 and 36 years old, are often spoken of as if they’re ushering in a new era of enlightened interpersonal relations. For example, in 2013 Time predicted Millennials would “save us all” because they are “more accepting of differences…in everyone.” That same year, The Atlantic stated that Millennials hold the “historically unprecedented belief that there are no inherently male or female roles in society.” And in 2015 the Huffington Post wrote that Millennial men are “likely to see women as equals.”

If these characterizations are even close to accurate, we should expect the pervasive, damaging biases against women leaders to diminish substantially, if not end entirely, once Millennials assume positions of economic, academic, and political power. But before we start celebrating a coming age of gender parity, we need to ask whether there is any truth to these characterizations. Do Millennials really believe there are no inherently male or female roles in society? Do Millennial men really “see women as equals”? Unfortunately, the best information we have indicates the answer to both questions is no.

In February 2016 researchers at the National Institutes of Health published a study on how college biology students view their classmates’ intelligence and achievements. The researchers found that male students systematically overestimated the knowledge of the men in their classes in comparison with the women. Moreover, as the academic term progressed, the men’s faulty appraisal of their classmates’ abilities increased despite clear evidence of the women’s superior class performance. In every biology class examined, a man was considered the most renowned student — even when a woman had far better grades. In contrast, the female students surveyed did not show bias, accurately evaluating their fellow students based on performance. After studying the attitudes of these future scientists, the researchers concluded, “The chilly environment for women [in the sciences] may not be going away anytime soon.”

Millennial men’s views of women’s intelligence and ability even extend to women in senior leadership positions. In a 2014 survey of more than 2,000 U.S. adults, Harris Poll found that young men were less open to accepting women leaders than older men were. Only 41% of Millennial men were comfortable with women engineers, compared to 65% of men 65 or older. Likewise, only 43% of Millennial men were comfortable with women being U.S. senators, compared to 64% of Americans overall. (The numbers were 39% versus 61% for women being CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, and 35% versus 57% for president of the United States.)

Moreover, according to a 2013 Pew survey of Americans, Millennial women are significantly more likely than older women to say that the country needs to continue making changes to bring about equality in the workplace, but Millennial men are the group most likely to say that all necessary changes have been made.

A glimmer of hope was found in the huge survey of Harvard Business School MBAs in a 2014 HBR article, which found that Millennial men were more likely than Gen X and Boomer men to predict that their wives would have equal careers, and less likely to do the majority of the child care. But that hope vanished when the researchers found the gap between what Millennial men and Millennial women believed was still wide: “Whereas three-quarters of Millennial women anticipate that their careers will be at least as important as their partners,” they reported, “half the men in their generation expect that their own careers will take priority.” The gap was similar when it came to child care responsibilities. Fewer than half of Millennial women believed they would handle most of the child care, but two-thirds of their male peers believed their wives would do so.

I’m not picking on millennials. My generation was way worse. My parents generation was way way worse.. Things are getting better. But these issues still exist and pretending otherwise is as old as the hills. When I was young men said they believed in equality too.

All this stuff runs deep and it’s important that all of us do a gut check once in a while. I know I have to, anyway.

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Sunday Funnies

by digby

(By the way, it was 3 emails in an email chain that she may not have seen. All the others were classified after the fact for ridiculous reasons. Just saying. The “lie” is pretty venial. But anyway …)

96 years and counting

by digby

From Roger Angel in the New Yorker:

I’m late weighing in on this election—late in more ways than one. Monday brought my ninety-sixth birthday, and, come November, I will be casting my nineteenth ballot in a Presidential election. My first came in 1944, when I voted for a fourth term for Franklin Delano Roosevelt, my Commander-in-Chief, with a mail-in ballot from the Central Pacific, where I was a sergeant in the Army Air Force. It was a thrilling moment for me, but not as significant as my vote on November 8th this year, the most important one of my lifetime. My country faces a danger unmatched in our history since the Cuban missile crisis, in 1962, or perhaps since 1943, when the Axis powers held most of Continental Europe, and Imperial Japan controlled the Pacific rim, from the Aleutians to the Solomon Islands, with the outcome of that war still unknown.

The first debate impends, and the odds that Donald Trump may be elected President appear to be narrowing. I will cast my own vote for Hillary Clinton with alacrity and confidence. From the beginning, her life has been devoted to public service and to improving the lives of children and the disadvantaged. She is intelligent, strong, profoundly informed, and extraordinarily experienced in the challenges and risks of our lurching, restlessly altering world and wholly committed to the global commonality. Her well-established connections to minorities may bring some better understanding of our urban and suburban police crisis. I have wished at times that she would be less impatient or distant when questions arrive about her past actions and mistakes, but I see no evidence to support the deep-rooted suspicions that often surround her. I don’t much like the high-level moneyed introductions and contacts surrounding the Clinton Foundation, but cannot find the slightest evidence that any of this has led to something much worse—that she or anyone has illegally profited or that any legislation tilted because of it. Nothing connects or makes sense; it beats me. Ms. Clinton will make a strong and resolute President—at last, a female leader of our own—and, in the end, perhaps a unifying one.

The Trump campaign has been like no other—a tumultuous and near-irresistible reality TV, in which Mr. Trump plays the pouty, despicable, but riveting central character. “I can’t stand him,” people are saying, “but you know, wow, he never stops.”

We know Mr. Trump’s early transgressions by heart: the female reporter who had “blood coming out of her whatever”; the mocking of a physically impaired reporter; the maligning of a judge because of his Mexican parents; the insulting dismissal of the grieving, Gold Star-parent Khans; the promised mass deportation of eleven million—or two million—undocumented immigrants, and more. Each of these remains a disqualifier for a candidate who will represent every one of us, should he win, but we now are almost willing to turn them into colorful little impairments. “Oh, that’s ol’ Donald—that’s the way he is.”

But I stick at a different moment—the lighthearted comment he made when, in early August, an admiring veteran presented him with a replica of his Purple Heart and Mr. Trump said, “I always wanted to get the Purple Heart. This was much easier.” What? Mr. Trump is saying he wishes that he had joined the armed forces somehow (he had a chance but skimmed out, like so many others of his time) and then had died or been scarred or maimed in combat? This is the dream of a nine-year-old boy, and it impugns the five hundred thousand young Americans who have died in combat in my lifetime, and the many hundreds of thousands more whose lives were altered or shattered by their wounds of war.
[…]
Reservations like this are predictable coming from someone my age, but I will persist, hoping to catch the attention of a few much younger voters, and of those who have not yet made up their minds about this election. I do so by inviting them to share an everyday experience—the middle-of-the-night or caught-in-traffic moment when we find our hovering second thoughts still at hand and waiting: Why did I ever?… What if?… Now I can see… and come to that pause, the unwelcome reconsideration that quiets us and makes us mature. It’s the same thought that Judge Learned Hand wanted posted in every school and church and courthouse in the land: “I beseech ye … think that we may be mistaken.”
[…]
Mr. Trump is endlessly on record as someone who will not back down, who cannot appear to pause or lose. He is a man who must win, stay on the attack, and who thinks, first and last, “How will I look?” This is central, and what comes after it, for me, at times, is concern for what it must be like for anyone who, facing an imperative as dark and unforgiving as this, finds only the narcissist’s mirror for reassurance.

If Donald Trump wins this election, his nights in the White House will very soon resemble those of President Obama. After he bids an early goodnight to his family, he sits alone while he receives and tries to take in floods of information from almost innumerable national and international sources, much of it classified or top secret. His surroundings are stately, but the room is shadowed and silent. There are bits of promising news here and there, but always more bloodshed, sudden alarms, and unexpected lurking dangers. The import of the news is often veiled or contradictory, or simply impenetrable. The night wears on, and may contain brief hours of sleep. There’s time to tweet. A new day is arriving, and with it the latest rush of bad news—another police shooting out West, another suicide bomber in Yemen, and other urgent briefings from a world already caught up in the morning’s difficult events. He needs to respond, but the beginning of this President’s response is always reliably at hand: How will I look?

The real question is why he looks so much better to to so many Americans. But then we know, don’t we? He is their voice.

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Mr. Robot goes to Washington: Snowden ***½

By Dennis Hartley

“If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.” 
-from “1984”, by George Orwell

Reality can be a tough act to follow. As I noted in my 2008 review of the biopic, W:

No one has ever accused Oliver Stone of being subtle. However, once audiences view his highly anticipated film concerning the life and times of George W. Bush, I think the popular perception about the director, which is that he is a rabid conspiracy theorist who rewrites history via Grand Guignol-fueled cinematic polemics, could begin to diminish.

If the Bush administration had never really happened, and this was a completely fictional creation, I would be describing Stone’s film by throwing out one-sheet ready superlatives […] But you see, when it comes to the life and legacy of one George W. Bush and the Strangelovian nightmare that he and his cohorts have plunged this once great nation into for the last eight years, all you have to do is tell the truth…and pass the popcorn.

Such is the conundrum for Snowden, writer-director Oliver Stone’s new biopic about Edgar Snowden, the former National Security Agency subcontractor who ignited an international political firestorm (and became a wanted fugitive) when he leaked top secret information to The Guardian back in 2013 regarding certain NSA surveillance practices.

The “tough act of follow” is Laura Poitras’ Oscar-winning 2014 documentary, Citizenfour. In 2013, Snowden invited Poitras, along with Guardian journalists Glenn Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill, for a meet at the Hong Kong hotel he was holed up in. This was the culmination of months of email exchanges between Snowden (sending encrypted text under the pseudonym of “Citizenfour”) and Poitras. Poitras found herself in the unique position of being a (circumstantial) “co-conspirator” in the story she was filming. The result was a gripping documentary that played like a paranoia-fueled thriller.

Now we have Oliver Stone, a filmmaker often accused by detractors of infusing his own politically charged, paranoia-fueled conspiracy theories into historical dramas like JFK and Nixon, diving head first into one of the most polarizing public debates of recent years: is Edgar Snowden a hero…or a traitor? It seems to be a marriage made in heaven. Surely, this should be a perfect impetus for the return of that fearless, rabble-rousing Oliver Stone of old…speaking truth to power through his art, consequences be damned.

This is actually a surprisingly restrained dramatization by Stone, which is not to say it is a weak one. In fact, quite the contrary-this time out, Stone had no need to take a magical trip to the wrong side of the wardrobe. That’s because the Orwellian machinations (casually conducted on a daily basis by our government) that came to light after Snowden lifted up the rock are beyond even the most feverish imaginings of the tin foil hat society.

In other words, you couldn’t make this shit up, either.

After opening with a cloak-and-dagger vignette set in 2013 on the streets of Hong Kong, Stone flashes back to 2004, where we see a younger, gung-ho Edgar Snowden (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) humping it through a grueling Special Forces training course. His Army reservist career is cut short after he breaks both legs in an accident. A few years later, still determined to serve his country, he finds a more ideal fit working at the CIA, where his (apparently) sharp computer hacking skills land him a position as an info tech. Stone follows Snowden’s various job relocations, from D.C. to Japan; eventually ending up at the NSA subcontracting firm Booz Allen in Hawaii (where he famously “did the deed”).

Stone alternates between the personal bio, which includes Snowden’s longtime relationship with his girlfriend Lindsay Mills (Shailene Woodley) and the increasingly furtive interview sessions with Snowden in the Hong Kong hotel room in 2013 by Guardian journalists Greenwald (Zachary Quinto) and MacAskill (Tom Wilkinson), while Poitras (Melissa Leo) dutifully continues filming. Gordon-Levitt uncannily captures Snowden’s vibe; although by the time credits roll, he remains a cypher. Then again, Snowden has said, “This really isn’t about me […] It’s about our right to dissent.”

Stylistically, the film felt to me like a throwback to cerebral cold war thrillers from the 1960s like The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, The Defector, Funeral in Berlin, and The Deadly Affair. This may not be by accident; because one of the core themes of the screenplay (adapted by Stone with Kieran Fitzgerald from Luke Harding’s The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World’s Most Wanted Man, and Anatoly Kucherena’s Time of the Octopus) is that we are, in fact, in the midst of a new “cold war”…in cyberspace.

As Snowden’s (fictional) mentor “Corbin O’Brien” (one of the more interesting creations in the film, especially as played by a scene-stealing Rhys Ifans) tells him, “The new battlefield is everywhere.” True that. It’s happening every day, all around us. It used to be a novelty, but it seems like my bank is issuing me a new credit card about every 6 months anymore, due to some nebulous “security breach”. Or how about the “DC Leaks” story…hacktivists with alleged Russian ties breaking into White House accounts at will?

But the question becomes, of course, how much of our privacy should we, as tax-paying citizens, be willing to sacrifice in the name of national security? As Greg Lake once sang:

Knowledge is a deadly friend
If no one sets the rules
The fate of all mankind, I see
Is in the hands of fools

Luckily, we have filmmakers like Stone and Poitras, journalists like Greenwald and MacAskill, and whistleblowers like Edgar Snowden, who do not suffer such fools gladly. Big Brother is watching us, but now we feel emboldened to ask: What are you lookin’ at?

Previous posts with related themes:

Kill the Messenger
State of Play
Breach
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

More reviews at Den of Cinema

–Dennis Hartley

“A monkey with a machine gun”
by Tom Sullivan

Still from viral video promoting Rise of the Planet of the Apes.

Former Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley may have lost the Democratic primary this year, but he may have won the Internet. When James Fallows asked him how he might prepare to debate Donald Trump if he had won the nomination, he said, “I’d start by thinking of him as a monkey with a machine gun.” Meaning you don’t know where he’ll be pointing it when it goes off. That is why tomorrow’s debate between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton will be the most-watched presidential debate in history.

Fallows looks at tomorrow’s debate for the Atlantic and, referencing the famous 160 debate between Richard Nixon and John Kennedy, noted that those who merely heard the debate on the radio called it a tie, but those who saw it on television felt the poised, handsome Kennedy had won. Thus, as the saying goes, “the most accurate way to predict reaction to a debate is to watch it with the sound turned off.”

That is why Trump’s focus on his primary opponents’ high or low energy is significant. Trump is a showman and does best when he can put on a show. Whether what he says is factual or whether he breaks rules is unimportant to the spectacle, or to his fans. Judd Legum observed at Think Progress how Trump’s experience in professional wrestling informs how he approaches his “performances.” Legum references the late French philosopher Roland Barthe’s take on wrestling and passion:

It is obvious that at such a pitch, it no longer matters whether the passion is genuine or not. What the public wants is the image of passion, not passion itself. There is no more a problem of truth in wrestling than in the theater.

This analogy reveals why the attacks on Trump are so ineffective. Recently, Rand Paul and others have taken to calling out Trump as an “entertainer,” rather than a legitimate candidate. This is as effective to running into the middle of the ring during Wrestlemania and yelling: “This is all fake!” You are correct, but you will not be received well.

Legum writes:

In the current campaign, Trump is behaving like a professional wrestler while Trump’s opponents are conducting the race like a boxing match. As the rest of the field measures up their next jab, Trump decks them over the head with a metal chair.

Others in the Republican field are concerned with the rules and constructing a strategy that, under those rules, will lead to the nomination. But Trump isn’t concerned with those things. Instead, Trump is focused on each moment and eliciting the maximum amount of passion in that moment. His supporters love it.

Fallows considers the kind of spectacle we might see tomorrow night. He writes:

These debates would be must-watch TV because they would be the most extreme contrast of personal, intellectual, and political styles in America’s democratic history. Right brain versus left brain; gut versus any portion of the brain at all; impulse versus calculation; id versus superego; and of course man versus woman. The two parties’ conventions this summer were stark contrasts in tone, stagecraft, and lineup of speakers. But they took place in different cities at different times. The first debate will be a matter-meets-antimatter conjunction at a single point. Live sports, from the Olympics to the Kentucky Derby, differ from other TV programming and compel live viewership because no one knows beforehand how things will turn out. The same is true of live presidential debates, above all any including Donald Trump.

Fallows’ review of this season’s GOP debate lowlights and what features to watch for tomorrow is better debate prep for the reader than Donald Trump will give himself. Simplicity. Ignorance. Dominance (humiliation). Gender. Trump’s limited range works for him. And makes it easy breezy for him to lie convincingly.

How might this go down tomorrow night and how might Clinton play it?

Donald Trump will almost certainly insult her directly, about her own crookedness and about the sins of her husband. This was the heart of his strategy during the primary debates—“I call him ‘Little Marco’ ”; “More energy tonight. I like that” to Bush—and is his instinct. She will answer those quickly and firmly—“My husband and I have been through a lot, as the world well knows. But after 41 years, we are still together”—and then move back to whatever policy point she wants to make. One way to describe this strategy is Martin O’Malley’s. “She has to be direct and tough right back to him, but then quickly pivot to what matters for the country,” he said. “It’s not enough just to disqualify this guy, since he’s survived remarks that in other times have been automatically disqualifying. She also needs to say what the election is about.”

Another way to describe this strategy is to use a phrase from Michelle Obama’s convention speech: When they go low, we go high.

With Trump, there’s no way to go but down. The task for Clinton will be to not let Trump drag her down to his level.