Donald Trump’s unrehearsed speaking style has been an asset for most of this campaign. People want to watch a guy who could say any off-the-wall thing at any moment.
Perhaps for that reason, or perhaps because he has a short attention span, Trump spent a lot less time preparing for last night’s debate than Hillary Clinton did. His aides didn’t try to hide that fact. His spokesperson mocked Clinton’s intense prep sessions. Trump himself needled his opponent about it during the debate.
Not doing his homework turned out to be a big mistake.
Visually, the debate was a disaster for Trump.
I made a point of watching the debate undistracted by social media. Four years ago, I listened to the first debate between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney on the radio. Later, I was surprised so many people thought the president did poorly, because I’d missed the visual cues.
Whereas Clinton was ready to be on a split screen for 90 minutes, Trump’s “resting face” looked angry almost from the start. As he became more agitated, he fidgeted and made unpleasant facial expressions. His sniffles were distracting as well. It was a surprisingly poor performance for someone who has appeared on television regularly for many years, and ironic, since Trump recently claimed Clinton didn’t have a “presidential look.”
Trump lost his cool early and never got it back.
I lost count of how many times Trump interrupted Clinton, but others counted 51 examples. Not only was the overall impression unstatesmanlike, Trump’s interjections often worked against him. He seemed to admit that he had paid no federal income taxes (“That makes me smart”). He took Clinton’s bait about having wished for a real estate crisis so he could make money (“That’s called business, by the way”). When Clinton joked, “I have a feeling that by the end of this evening I’m going to be blamed for everything that’s ever happened,” Trump interrupted, “Why not?”
Trump didn’t like being corrected by the moderator when he lied (again) about having opposed the war with Iraq, or when he claimed he can’t release his tax returns because of a federal audit, or when he misstated facts about the stop-and-frisk policy in New York City.
By the last half-hour, Trump had been reduced to whining about Clinton’s supposedly unfair television commercials and defending his misogyny with a bizarre attack on Rosie O’Donnell. Although the audience had been instructed to keep silent, gasps and giggles were audible when Trump claimed to have a “much better temperament,” a “winning temperament.”
Clinton made no big mistakes; Trump made several.
While no debate can magically transform Hillary-haters into supporters, I didn’t hear anything from Clinton that might drive away someone genuinely open to voting for her. She sounded confident, knowledgeable, and calm, especially near the end of the debate when the topic turned to foreign policy.
For all of Trump’s bluster about how “tremendous” he is, he botched answers to entirely predictable questions. NBC’s Lester Holt wasn’t grilling him about tough stuff, like Trump Foundation irregularities. He asked about obvious topics: what took Trump so long to accept that Obama was born in the U.S., why hasn’t Trump released his tax returns.
Even Republican hack Hugh Hewitt admitted after the debate that Trump handled the “birther” exchange poorly. After pushing the conspiracy theory for years, Trump got lost in the weeds arguing about what obscure Clinton staffers supposedly did in 2008. At the same time, he couldn’t stop bragging about how he “did a great job and a great service in getting the President to give his birth certificate.”
Clinton needled Trump by speculating on reasons he might be hiding his tax returns (maybe he’s not as wealthy as he claims, or not as charitable, or he just doesn’t want us to know that he pays no federal taxes). She brought up several unflattering sides of Trump that are well-known to political junkies but probably not to most of the debate viewers: his false narrative about being self-made when in reality, his father gave him millions; his failure to pay thousands of people who did work for his businesses; his habit of using bankruptcy to avoid paying debts; the government’s 1973 lawsuit against his real estate company, which didn’t rent apartments to black people; his demeaning treatment of former Miss Universe Alicia Machado, whom he called “Miss Piggy” and “Miss Housekeeping” (because she’s a Latina).
The best thing I can say about Trump’s performance is he hammered home a bunch of talking points that resonate with his supporters: our trade policy is a “disaster”; politicians have failed to solve the problems; we need law and order; I’m a negotiator, I can make good deals; Hillary has experience but it’s “bad experience.” Even so, I can’t think of anything Trump said that would bring undecided voters into his corner. On the contrary, he reinforced doubts people might have had about his knowledge base and whether he is prepared to do the most important job in the world. He lacked a a professional demeanor and told many lies that are easy to disprove.
Belitting Clinton for lacking the “stamina” to be president, Trump sounded like “a parody of his generation of male corporate execs dismissing women in their ranks.” Clinton was ready with a great answer: “Well, as soon as he travels to 112 countries negotiating peace treaties and deals…or even spends 11 hours testifying in front of a congressional panel, then he can talk to me about stamina.”
Dan Guild argued yesterday that the debate presented an opportunity for Clinton to consolidate support among Democratic-leaning voters who are not enthusiastic. The next ten days of polling will show whether she succeeded, and whether voters will drift away from third-party candidates, as has happened at this point in past campaigns.
But Clinton has to feel good about how she spent the last week, and it must have been satisfying to deliver this line: “I think Donald just criticized me for preparing for this debate. And yes, I did. And you know what else I prepared for? I prepared to be president. And I think that’s a good thing.”
Any comments about the presidential election are welcome in this thread. If you missed the debate, PBS put up the whole video here.
P.S.- Your unintentional comedy for today comes from Iowa Republicans, whose post-debate press releases could sound convincing only to someone who hadn’t watched. This from Iowa GOP Chair Jeff Kaufmann:
“Tonight, Hillary Clinton did what she does best, she reinvented history. Donald Trump showed a clear vision for America, while Hillary Clinton showed why she is completely disqualified from serving as our next president. Americans are looking for a new direction after eight years of President Obama’s failures, but all we heard from her was more of the same stale pandering and falsehoods we’ve heard for the past two decades. If memorizing talking points is what it takes to be president, Hillary is right, she has been practicing for years. It isn’t surprising Donald Trump was the clear winner of tonight’s debate considering how Hillary Clinton continued her pattern of dishonesty and failed to fully explain her long history of unethical behavior.” Chairman Jeff Kaufmann
Governor Terry Branstad’s reaction arrived in an e-mail from the Trump campaign:
“Tonight, Hillary Clinton once again reminded voters that she is dishonest and unfit for leadership. Voters know that while she is controlled by special interests in Washington, Donald Trump is a fresh new leader who will upend the status quo and put the American people first. As always, Donald Trump spoke from the heart during tonight’s debate and showed us the type of president he will be – a strong leader with serious plans to create millions of new jobs, confront radical Islamic terror, and take care of our nation’s veterans.” – Governor Terry Branstad (R-IA)
What serious plans? Clinton dismantled the idea that “Trumped-up trickle down economics” would create jobs. The only time taking care of veterans came up tonight was when she pointed out Trump contributed nothing toward that goal during the years he paid no federal taxes.
UPDATE: In the New York Times, David Leonhardt listed 26 lies Trump told during the debate.
Trump spent part of Tuesday morning on Fox News. Aside from complaining about his microphone and moderator Lester Holt’s questions, he inexplicably went after Alicia Machado again for gaining weight after winning the Miss Universe pageant. Not only did he keep an unflattering story alive for another day, Trump made his “feud” with Machado a top news item in Spanish-language media. Jonathan Chait chronicled “How Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump Made Alicia Machado the New Khizr Khan.”
You can watch the Fox hosts cringe as Trump launches into the diatribe, and then, as they gently try to steer him away, insists on returning to the subject. They can see him destroying himself again, in real time, in exactly the way they begged him to stop doing earlier in the summer, yet they cannot stop it.
Life rarely works out in such a simple and dramatically perfect way. Terrible human beings usually know how to conceal their terribleness. […] Trump, however, is not only a horrible human being but a congenitally incompetent one.
Meanwhile, the debate drew more viewers than any other presidential debate in U.S. history, and as Caitlin Dewey reported for the Washington Post, Google searches “for the phrase ‘registrarse para votar’ — ‘register to vote,’ in Spanish — hit an all-time high during Monday’s presidential debate, spiking to more than 100,000 searches.”
On Tuesday, Clinton became the first Democratic presidential candidate ever endorsed by the Arizona Republic, a newspaper founded in 1890.