The Official GOP Debate Drinking Game Rules, Pt. 2

So the second GOP debate is upon us, scheduled for 8 p.m. EST on CNN tonight. The moderators are Hugh Hewitt, Jake Tapper and Dana Bash. You’ll be reading a lot more about those names within 24 hours.

The first debate was an epic piece of comic theater. It featured at least a half dozen laugh-out-loud moments, including: the now-infamous Megyn Kelly-Donald Trump imbroglio, Mike Huckabee accusing Planned Parenthood of selling baby parts like “parts of a Buick,” Ben Carson bragging that he was the only candidate to remove half a brain, Chris Christie and Rand Paul trading hilariously cringe-worthy “hug” jokes, Trump bragging that he bought Hillary Clinton with campaign contributions and many other choice exchanges.

It was salacious, pathetic, vapid, undignified, degrading, uninformative and compelling, making it a model for how Americans will consume politics going forward in the reality TV era.

This debate promises to be just as explosive. In fact, this affair is, quite frankly, a setup. All three moderators have tangled with Donald Trump before. In fact, the event seems like Jerry Springer-style tactics by CNN: putting people disposed to throw chairs at each other onstage, turning the cameras on and waiting for all hell to break loose.  

Hewitt in particular is virtually guaranteed to get into a scrap with Trump. A former Nixon ghostwriter, Hewitt is one of the most vile people in America, a charmless, self-congratulating pedant whose fiendishly boring right-wing radio show might be called Not as Smart as I Think I Am.

Hewitt interviewed Trump earlier this month and fired a string of gotcha-style foreign policy questions at the Donald, daring him to name the leaders of Hezbollah, al-Qaeda and ISIS. Trump deflected as only he knows how, saying that he didn’t know but that it didn’t matter because by the time he made it to office, “they’ll all be gone.” Similar to the Kelly episode, he grew angry about the exchange overnight, and the next day told Joe Scarborough that Hewitt is a “third rate radio announcer.”

Bash, meanwhile, did the interview with Trump where he blasted attorney Elizabeth Beck for being “disgusting” while breastfeeding. And Tapper went after Trump in his own interview for promoting “traditional” marriage when Trump himself has been married three times.

My guess is that the debate will play right into Trump’s hands. Hewitt, who was a Harvard housemate of Grover Norquist and was tutored by Alan Keyes, will act as a stand-in for the Republican Party bigwigs: he’ll try to bloody Trump by exposing his lack of concrete knowledge, in the area of foreign affairs particularly. Expect questions along the lines of, “Who is Hassan Nasrallah’s favorite soccer player?” or “Name two countries in South America.”

This will make for excellent theater, but what Trump’s audiences will see is their candidate being pestered by one GOP puppet and two reporters from CNN, which in ‘Murica is widely understood to be a wing of the Democratic Party.