Excerpt
SUMMARY: Since Monday night's debate, Donald Trump's taxes and tweets have drawn rapt attention. Syndicated columnist Mark Shields and New York Times columnist David Brooks join Hari Sreenivasan to discuss the "bizarreness" of the week's campaign developments, Hillary Clinton's struggle to win millennial voters back from third-party candidates and the congressional decision to override a presidential veto.
HARI SREENIVASAN (NewsHour): And that brings us to the analysis of Shields and Brooks. That's syndicated columnist Mark Shields and New York Times columnist David Brooks.
Gentlemen, here we are. Monday night, you were here after the debate.
And now my first question isn't about a significant policy discrepancy. The entire news cycle has been concerned with whether or not he paid taxes and also how he is treating a beauty queen, or how he treated her and how he is still treating her.
MARK SHIELDS, Syndicated columnist: You're right, although I don't think they're bookends. I don't think they're of equal value or significance.
I think that his disdain for paying taxes and his self-identification as a smart person for not doing so reveals any absence, a total absence of civic-mindedness, citizen responsibility.
I mean, the idea of John Kennedy's ask not what you can do for your country — ask not what your country can do you for, but what you can do for your country, is just so alien to that.
But the attack on Alicia Machado fits a pattern. I mean, this is a man who, as Tony Schwartz, who wrote “The Art of the Deal,” the ghost writer of it, and made Trump really a central figure in America with that book, wrote — he said, every time he's criticized or caught for any of his lies, he doubles down.
And that's exactly what he does. And usually in the pattern with Mr. and Mrs. Khan, the Gold Star parents; and with Judge Curiel, is to pick on someone who doesn't have the resources, the stature, the voice that he does, and try to overwhelm them.
HARI SREENIVASAN: David, we're working on a story for Sunday on kind of the impact on the Latino vote in Florida, for example.
And we even saw, since the debate, increase in search registration, searches in predominantly Latino areas, according to Google. Is this going to matter, the fact that he has called this Miss Housekeeping? Did that resonate? Did that connect?
DAVID BROOKS, New York Times: If the vote can go any lower.
It might affect turnout potentially. But his support in the Latino community wasn't super high. And his support among women is not super high. So, it may go lower. But maybe it can't.
But to me, the crucial fact of this story — well, first, we should just step back and be aware of its bizarreness, that we are a month away from electing a President and one of our candidates is up in the middle of the night tweeting about an alleged sex tape.
MARK SHIELDS: A 70-year-old grandfather.
DAVID BROOKS: Yes. Yes. It's just another day in paradise as far as this election goes. And so we should just continue to remind ourselves of that bizarreness.
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