Why The Trump Kids Matter

Once one plows past all the fake media noise about Melania's supposed plagiarism and Ted Cruz getting booed off the stage, what is the main thing any normal person with functioning brain synapses will remember about this GOP National Convention?

Trump's kids.  Right?  Wow, what incredible kids.  What eloquence.  What composure, even from Tiffany, who just got out of college.  What amazing love, respect and admiration every one of them express for their father.  And we haven't even heard yet from Ivanka, who, at age 34, is probably the most accomplished of them all and her father's closest advisor.

Not even the flea bags who infest CNN have been able to find a means of slandering any of them yet, and you have to know they've been feverishly trying to come up with something.  That's what CNN does to Republicans, after all.

Don't let the fake media fool you:  These four kids are without any question at all the most important aspect of this convention in terms of influencing how this election will turn out.

Why?  Because no father who has turned out four such amazing children can possibly be the "dangerous" individual that the Clinton camp wants - and needs - you all to believe that he is.

As I've repeatedly said, this is not a normal election.  It's not about issues, not about position papers, not about who is qualified or not qualified to hold the office.  It's not even about who is going to be able to raise and spend the most money.  In fact, all the money-grubbing Hillary is doing probably hurts her more than it helps at the end of the day.

This election is about communications and persuasion, which means that it is really about one thing:  Whether or not Donald Trump can convince most voters that he is not "dangerous".

That's why these four young adults are the most important aspect of this convention.  Sorry, Newt;  sorry, Chris;  sorry, Marco and Ted and even Mike Pence.  You are all just an irrelevant side show, time eaters on the agenda more than anything else.

The Trump kids are what matters, and Ivanka gets her turn to help humanize and elect her father tonight.  Does anyone doubt she will do a spectacular job?

************

About Ted Cruz:  Everyone needs to understand that Trump doesn't care about Cruz's refusal to keep his word and endorse the GOP nominee.  It doesn't matter to him.  He saw Sen. Cruz's script days in advance, and made no suggested changes to it.

Trump's world is about dominating the news cycle.  Doesn't matter to him if the news is positive or negative about him, so long as it is about him.  He takes whatever news comes, and plays off of it.  That's what he means when he says he is mostly a 'counter-puncher'.

Which is why he wasn't upset last night and his campaign people aren't upset this morning.  They knew Cruz was about to hang himself with the convention delegates, and gave him the rope to go do it with.  Thus, Cruz looks petty for refusing to keep his word, and Trump looks gracious for giving him the prime time speaking slot.

Sen. Cruz and his father both reportedly believe he is destined to become President of the United States.  That may indeed happen some day, but after last night, it most likely won't be as the nominee of the Republican Party.  But hey, the Libertarians are always looking for someone willing to carry their flag.

Hillary's Speech, Trump's Response: Who wins?

If you read the entire transcript of Hillary Clinton's "foreign policy" speech that she read from her Teleprompter on Thursday, what you come away with is the understanding that her advisors - who control every word she utters - have decided that her best tactic is to defend this country's "bi-partisan" foreign policy establishment.  By extension, that means that the Hillary campaign will defend the foreign policy decisions made not just over the last 8 years, but over the last 16 years.

She went out of her way to emphasize that Trump opposes the "wisdom" of the "bi-partisan" foreign policy decisions made over the last two presidencies. She is doing the same this afternoon in an interview with Jake Tapper on CNN.

She is hanging her hat not just on giving us 4 more years of the last 8 years, but giving us 4 more years of the last 16 years.

Now, understand that Donald Trump has advanced to where he has gotten in this race by running against not only the Obama foreign policy decisions, but against the Bush 43 foreign policy decisions as well.  He has done this because he understands what Hillary and her team obviously still do not:  That millions and millions of American voters are sick to death not just of what they have experienced during the Obama years, but what they have experienced for the duration of the 21st Century.

Hillary's press team in the national news media have done their best to portray her stilted, crushingly tedious recitation as some sort of a tour de force, and she will no doubt get some small polling bump out of it all in the near term.  Maybe even enough of a bump to get her over the hump against Bernie in California next week.

In the long term, however, if this is what the Hillary strategy is going to look like, it's a loser. Big time.  Because the core message here is that 'hey, everything's great, our country's foreign policy over the last 16 years has been terrific, and that dangerous Trump guy might come in and mess it all up.'

That literally is the message of that speech in a nutshell.

If any of you out there reading this really believe that this country's foreign policy decisions over the last 16 years have been fabulous, I'd sure love to hear about it in the comments section.

The bottom line here is that, by this time next week, Donald Trump will have turned every point Hillary read yesterday to his favor.