Musings on 3/4/16: Applied Clinton-Speak

GOP Front-runner Donald Trump may be headed for a presidency contest with Hillary Clinton, but he seems to be borrowing heavily from Bill Clinton's political playbook. That playbook was incrementally publicized through the interviews and written offerings of his strategists and advisers, once they were untethered by his reelection. So, it was about twenty years ago that we learned that, as a rule, Clinton calculatedly quashed blowback by applying the concept of plausible deniability (a term coined by the CIA in the early 1960s) to explanations of his questionable political moves and conflicting remarks made under oath. I give you Bill's iconic semantic defense, enshrined in the many definitions of the phrase sexual relations and the word is, as THE seminal example.

Now consider how Trump responds each time he's confronted about his crass commentary. Three examples will suffice to amply prove the point. None is about his public statements during his divorces; that would be too easy. Instead, let's take a look at how he explained his remarks about Carley Fiorina's face, Megyn Kelly bleeding, and-just yesterday-Mitt Romney being on his knees.

His reference to Fiorina's face was metaphoric, he said. And he was referring, he claimed, only to those orifices that are north of Kelly's neck. While Romney being on his knees was, Trump will say, an allusion to begging.

Expectedly, many shouted back that he was clearly not speaking figuratively about Fiorina's face, that he was obviously referring to

Megyn's menstruation, and that his knee narrative suggested fellatio on its face-if you will. 

Others carefully reviewed exactly what he said each time, quietly concluding that-if Trump planned this-he has irrecoverably and unceremoniously supplanted Bill Clinton as the most skilled politician ever.