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Trump Is Not the Man He Used to Be

His belligerent debate performance revealed the president has lost the confidence he had four years ago, and it will cost him.

Donald Trump believes, to his core, that a single event in 2016 clinched him the presidency.

It wasn’t the FBI reopening its investigation into Hillary Clinton. It wasn’t the Wikileaks dump of hacked DNC emails. It wasn’t the published list of potential Supreme Court nominees, or the selection of Mike Pence, or Clinton’s comment about “deplorables.”

To Trump, the pivotal moment of the campaign was the second presidential debate. On the second Sunday in October, the Republican nominee arrived in St. Louis a dead man walking. Just 48 hours earlier, the Washington Post had publicized an old recording on which Trump boasted about grabbing women by the genitals. A number of leading Republicans publicly renounced his candidacy. Many more pleaded with the party chairman, Reince Priebus, to remove him from the ticket. The morning before the debate, Priebus warned Trump, “Either you’ll lose in the biggest landslide in history, or you can get out of the race and let somebody else run who can win.” Continue reading.

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