WATCH LIVE: Trump Holds Rally In Iowa At 4 PM ET

I’m going to use this new thread to repeat a point that Adam Gopnik makes brilliantly in the New Yorker: Trump’s problem, in debates, interviews, rallies or whatever forum he appears on, isn’t that he isn’t sufficiently prepared or that he’s technically deficient: it’s that he’s hateful, stupid, and fraudulent. As Gopnik puts it: This debate was not a bad performance. This is a bad man.

Well, yeah. The only thing is, with a person whose public persona is the only part of them you’re ever likely to see, the performance can tell you quite a bit. I was reading a James Fallows piece the other day about how people perceive Cruz as “creepy” in large part because when he tries to look empathetic he uses a fake expression because he’s not a skillful enough actor to imitate a genuine one. With Trump, his beliefs are noxious, of course. He’s an extremely bad man. He is indeed hateful, stupid, and fraudulent. But his poor performances help us realize, among other things, that his badness includes laziness, disregard for the demands of the presidency, ignorance, inattentiveness, inability to concentrate, inarticulateness, simplistic thinking, disorganized thinking, poor impulse control—well, I could go on but you get the idea. He can be judged on other aspects of his life, certainly, but the poor performance isn’t irrelevant IMHO. I would think Gopnik is arguing with certain superficial media figures, not so much with us here, and I’m not arguing with him or you so much. But I think part of the challenge of living in a media-saturated culture is to judge people from a distance. Clearly we need to get better at it, is my main point I guess. : )

Some of us are already pretty good at it. Or maybe it’s just that we’ve seen the rise and fall of so many of them and learned that they’re all quite human with good and bad qualities.

As for Trump, I’m not sure what his good qualities are.