It’s a cardinal sin in any sort of conflict to underestimate your opponent. That’s true in football, boxing, war…and in politics. No matter how weak your adversary is, or appears to be, it is foolish to count your chickens before they’re hatched. To paraphrase Bob Griese, overconfidence leads to arrogance, which leads to carelessness, which leads to defeat.

I’m not saying underestimation was the folly of Trump himself. I do consider him overconfident, but I honestly don’t know what goes through his mind most of the time.

But it definitely is the folly of Trump’s supporters. Loudmouths all over the “Alt Right” and, in fact, all over the neomasculine blogosphere have been talking smack about the debates for months, assuming a Trump victory with some rather outlandish predictions–like Hillary wouldn’t even show up; or that she would collapse on stage or go into a coughing fit.

This smack-talking is nothing new. I remember vividly from 2012, from memes and comment threads, how the cuck Paul Ryan was going to destroy the moron Joe Biden in their debate; and even how RINO Mitt Romney was going to win the election in a landslide.

The enemy is so weak, all we have to do is show up. Like Mike Tyson in Tokyo.

Evil is rarely incompetent. The people who installed Barack Hussein Obama, and who have sold Hillary to half of the electorate already, did not get to where they are by inept buffonery. It is idiotic to assume that Hillary’s handlers can’t prep her to look good for 90 minutes. They made Obama look good, for Kek’s sake.

But the debate wasn’t lost because Hillary looked good. It wasn’t even because the “mediator” is a shill for the Democrats. (Anybody with a functioning brain has come to expect that.)

Trump beat himself.

The man is just not a good speaker. He played defense, letting Hillary take, and maintain, the initiative. He missed opening after opening, wasted time with bumbling explanations that nearly always missed the key points, and often proved himself incapable of even completing a coherent sentence.

The swing voters are just as superficial as the “Alt Right” loudmouths who assume a Trumpslide because alpha male. (And because “master of rhetoric.”) This has been a fact since the very first televised presidential debate. They will choose a silver-tongued devil like Slick Willy or Hussein every time, even when they know they’re being lied to (or should know–this goes back to the whole functioning brain qualifier).  Trump didn’t look “presidential,” or even comfortable. I fully expect to read and hear descriptive words like “rude” and “bully” all day tomorrow. Maybe even “illiterate,” “dullard,” “unintelligent” or the like. That is the image he presented to the ovine masses.

I could never be a politician, for many reasons. One of them is that I am probably even worse than Trump at expressing my ideas orally.  I do not level these criticisms of him out of any notion that I could have performed better.

I’m merely observing that he needs a different game plan if he has any hope of articulating his own ideas or exposing Hillary’s glaring weaknesses in such a fashion that the lapdog media won’t be able to continue hiding them. I’m also observing that the smack-talkers on the Trump Train are not to be taken seriously, now or ever.

Learn from history, lest you repeat it.

…Again.