Dear Donald Trump,
You have now participated in two presidential debates for the 2016 election. You had an experience of how Hilary Clinton’s debate style was at the first presidential debate. Therefore, you should have been more prepared for this time to debate against her on the debate prompts which were mentioned at this second presidential debate. However, your lack of using the debate style of your opponent, Hilary Clinton, to your advantage was clearly not evident in the second presidential debate.
Instead of choosing to better yourself from the previous presidential debate, you continued with the same underdeveloped debate form. You used a debate style that was weak due it lacking any formal type of dialogue order for a developed debate. For example, you constantly interrupted Hilary Clinton with your rebuttals when it was Hilary Clinton’s speaking time for her to express her counter-arguments. This was especially evident when Hillary Clinton was finished talking about her stance on the video that was released of you making misogynistic comments and jokes. You even interrupted the host, Martha Raddatz, when she tried to get the debate back on track due to having time constrictions for asking online questions. In addition, to having this bad debate behavior you made contradicting comments about yourself. The majority of the statements you made about yourself, such as “But I have tremendous respect for women” contradicted the negative comments you had previously made within the video. This contradiction was due to the evidence the video had showed and this evidence made you look like you were uninformed even about your own opinions.
Overall, the weak debate style behaviors you utilized and portrayed to the American Public at the previous presidential debate and in this presidential debate were uncalled for. This is because as a candidate for the future role of the US Presidency you should have at least a basic idea of what strong debate behaviors are. You should be able to inform others about what your viewpoints are without interrupting your other opponent. You should be able to form your rebuttals to the counteracting arguments to that of your opponent. Also you should not talk about a completely unrelated topic. This will only stall the debate and make it less likely that you can debate on a topic you would actually want to debate on. However, debating is not a skill many are born with. It is a skill which has to be learned through practice. Therefore, I will give you some skills, strategies, and tools which will help you to become a stronger debater in future presidential debates.
There are several skills, strategies, and tools I will share with you on how you can be a stronger debater. However, unless you attempt to utilize them in future debates, you will still have the weak debating style you currently have. One solution I would recommend is that you do not interrupt your opponent while they are speaking during the debate. Instead you should use this time to formulate counter-arguments to the rebuttals of your opponent. You can do this by taking notes while they are speaking. A second solution I would recommend is that before the debate you should be up to date on your opponent’s views. You should create several diagrams which outline both the for and against main points of their arguments. I understand you may not have every argument outlined that is used within the debate but having at least a few will help guide you to create rebuttals to your opponent’s counter-arguments.
In conclusion, if you follow these pieces of advice, you will become a stronger debater in the future presidential debates. This is because you will have better tactics than just interrupting and using cross-talk to get your views across within a debate. I hope you take this advice into future consideration.
