The Audience That Should Be At The Presidential Debate

Hillary Clinton invited billionaire and Shark Tank host Mark Cuban to Monday’s presidential debate. The presence of a sane billionaire was supposed to rattle Trump, but instead Trump threatened to invite Gennifer Flowers, who had an affair with Bill Clinton for more than a decade in the 1980s. Flowers accepted but according to Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway, she won’t be invited.

The campaign did the right thing by normal standards. Inviting Flowers to the debate is an indecent and classless act, but what does decency and class have to do with the 2016 election?

I can’t help but think Trump was on to something which would have the entire country focused on the state of the race. It would have been great had the Commission on Presidential Debates let each campaign pick half the studio audience. Had Trump invited Flowers, Clinton could have responded by inviting someone who Trump had cheated. The USA Freedom Kids would be a good choice. The pre-teen girls sang a song about Mister Trump that became an Internet sensation and generated positive publicity of the campaign.  The author of the song and father of one of the girls is suing Trump for breaking his agreement with the group. Perhaps they could even perform a new version of their hit with the lyrics rewritten to reflect the reality of the lawsuit, “Donald Trump…he ripped us off…”

Trump could invite John Huang who is top Democratic fundraiser who was convicted of criminal conspiracy during the first Clinton presidency for his role in illegally raising money from China for the DNC to influence U.S. elections. Huang was part of a much larger scandal that included the Clinton Administration selling access to the Lincoln Bedroom for campaign contributions. Trump could certainly add in other figures from the scandal to provide reminders of the classless exploitation of taxpayer property for the Clintons’ political gain.

Clinton could bring in disgruntled students of Trump University: single mothers, the elderly, and all the others who spent tens of thousands of dollars hoping for a better life for them and their family and then ended up with nothing but a worthless piece of paper.

Trump could then call on Linda Tripp, who Clinton’s husband tried to pressure into lying under oath. Clinton herself then told the world that her husband wasn’t guilty of anything but only the victim of a “vast right wing conspiracy,” and turned Tripp into an object of ridicule and hate.

Clinton would focus on the ugliness Trump has inspired and bring in people who Trump has maligned and bullied, such as Megyn Kelly and Rafeal Cruz. She could focus on how Trump has empowered the alt right by inviting journalists who have been threatened by anti-Semitic Trump supporters, and Erick Erickson, who has hired security due to death threats received from Trump supporters.

Trump could then invite Mrs. Clinton’s former Secret Service Agent who has denounced her character, with Clinton countering by inviting Mr. Trump’s ghost writer on the Art of the Deal who has done the same.

Trump could go to the more recent past by inviting Patricia Smith and other family members of those killed at Benghazi who say Secretary Clinton lied to their face about the cause of the attacks. Hillary Clinton could then go way back in the past and find any survivors who can be identified of victims of Trump activities that led to the federal housing racial discrimination case filed against Trump in 1973.

And the selection could go on and on until the entire debate hall was filled from one end to another with people who one or the other of these candidates has bullied, harassed, abused, lied to, cheated, or collaborated with on one despicable act or another.  The debate would occur at a convention of the two leading candidates’ victims, accusers, and co-conspirators. Rather than showing fresh faced college kids that will actually be present at the Hofstra University debate, every cut to the audience would show someone who would remind us of who these candidates really are and that not a single word they say can be believed.

Both candidates’ lives have been about the selfish pursuit of money, power, fame, and reputation and they’ve had no problem lying, cheating, and leaving others holding the bag.  Both also have a ravenous hunger for power that could devour our nation’s constitutional system of government. Those who actually believe that either of them care about the American people are sad proof that a quote often attributed to Abraham Lincoln is right: “You can fool some of the people all of the time.”

We’ll never see all the people that I wrote about in one room, but we know that they exist and that should motivate our actions. The appropriate response to the manifold evidence of both candidates unsuitably is to go against the odds and support a third party candidate who would protect our liberty.