Trump show too juvenile for Jerry Springer
The stories that matter on money and politics in the race for the White House
When one of the bickering men on stage stated that there was nothing diminutive about parts of his anatomy, viewers could have been forgiven for thinking they were watching the latest episode of The Jerry Springer Show.
Even the host of the raucous talk show — which has seen episodes on themes such as “I married a horse” — is stunned by the Republican race.
“They ought to run a crawl along the bottom of the screen, [saying] ‘This is NOT a debate for junior high school class president’, Mr Springer told the Financial Times.
At the Republican debate on Thursday, Mr Trump took umbrage at Marco Rubio for having previously mocked the size of his hands and saying: “You know what they say about men with small hands . . . you can’t trust them.”
Mr Trump responded to the innuendo: “Look at those hands. Are they small hands? And he referred to my hands, if they are small, something else must be small. I guarantee you there is no problem.”
On Friday, Mr Trump tweeted an online poll by the conservative-leaning Drudge Report news site, which showed that 59 per cent of respondents felt that he had won the debate. Frank Luntz, a Republican pollster who held a focus group during the debate, said his participants were “initially amused and then highly annoyed that precious time was wasted on ‘hand’ size”.
Some “22 of the 25 had a negative reaction to the debate and 24 of the 25 felt it would actually benefit the Democrats because of all the ‘adolescent’ and ‘schoolyard’ comments,” said Mr Luntz.
Mr Springer, a former mayor of Cincinnati, says the presidential candidates would be prime contenders for his show if they were ordinary Americans. That rules out Mr Trump whom some critics have accused of running a reality TV-style presidential campaign in the wake of his tenure as the celebrity host of The Apprentice.
“Clearly they could be on our show, but now they’ve gone off the deep end, and we would start bleeping out some of what they’d say,” said Mr Springer.
The juvenile nature of the debate shocked many people who were already accustomed to a contest that at times has resembled a lurid reality television show.
After an exchange where Mr Trump and Mr Rubio lobbed “Little Marco” and “Big Donald” insults at each other, the Fox News moderator scolded the candidates for the most powerful job in the world: “Gentlemen. Gentlemen. You have got to do better than this,” said Chris Wallace.
Mr Rubio later defended his taunts, saying someone had to respond to Mr Trump who has insulted almost everyone involved in the debates, from Megyn Kelly, one of the Fox anchors, to “low energy” Jeb Bush and “Lyin’ Ted” Cruz, the Texas senator who also upbraided Mr Trump.
“Donald . . . Breathe, breathe, breathe. You can do it. You can breathe. I know it’s hard. I know it’s hard,” Mr Cruz quipped, which prompted Mr Rubio to remark that he had something to say when “they’re done with the yoga”.
Testament to the unorthodox nature of the 2016 race is that Mr Trump’s pledge to build a wall along the Mexican border is now one of the less controversial things that has been said on the campaign trail.
Mr Springer cannot run for president because he was born inside London’s Highgate station during the second world war when his Jewish parents were fleeing the Nazis. But that, he jokes, is a good thing for America.
“If it was Springer versus Trump, there really would be a wall on the border because you’d need to build a wall to keep Americans from trying to get out,” he joked, referring to the border with Canada and Mexico. “I mean, people would be taking hot air balloons to try to get out!”
White House Countdown: Sign up for our daily US election email
Comments