Debate should have closed the deal for Hillary
If Hillary Clinton loses the election in November, the Commission on Presidential Debates should disband. We’ll have no more need for debates. They will have proved meaningless.
Hillary Clinton emphatically won Monday night’s debate against Donald Trump, topping her Republican opponent in every category – poise, command of the facts, one-liners, civility and looking presidential. The only category in which Trump could claim victory was living down to his camp’s diminished expectations.
Trump was in spin mode Tuesday, first insisting he had won then blaming his insentient performance on moderator Lester Holt, and a faulty microphone. He’d done better if his mic had been turned off, sparing the nation his snorts, untruths and incivility.
Fawning surrogate Rudy Giuliani originally tweeted Monday’s performance “was not @realDonaldTrump’s best.” A few hours later, Giuliani suggested his hero might back out of any additional debates since Trump’s tenuous grasp of the truth had twice been pointed out by Holt.
The real message: Only by dropping out can Trump avoid further embarrassment.
Cool-headed and well-prepared, Clinton showed restraint even as Trump desperately tried to rattle her. Trump interrupted Clinton 51 times – 25 in the first 26 minutes. He backed off as the debate wore on, mainly because he appeared to be losing stamina. No one had ever seen a presidential debate like this; but then, no other debate had ever included a woman.
What did Trump’s repeated interruptions – often grunts like “not” – show? Only that Trump figured he could get away with it against a woman. Hillary made sure he didn’t, interrupting him 17 times.
When she called him on his original support for the Iraq war (tape-recorded in 2002), he tried to slough it off. He tried to pretend his racist “birther” campaign was Hillary’s fault. He blamed computer hacking on an imaginary 400-pound person instead of his business partners in Russia. He repeated the dog-whistle words “law and order” eight times, though his plan for fighting crime has been ruled unconstitutional (which he denies) because it targets men of color (oh, and it doesn’t work). He insisted he couldn’t release his tax returns because he’s under audit – which Holt noted was fallacious.
Trump interrupted Clinton to say that not paying any taxes on hundreds of millions of dollars of income for two years “makes me smart.” Many of Trump’s sycophantic supporters will agree, but when wealthy people avoid paying taxes the rest of us have to pick up the slack.
He also said: “My obligation right now is to do well for myself, my family, my employees, for my companies.”
How about Trump’s customers, clients, vendors (who have sued him some 4,000 times) or the American people? No, in his mind this campaign is singularly about the aggrandizement of Trump – one of the eight descriptors of classic narcissistic personality disorder.
By Tuesday, fact-checkers were pointing out he was wrong about China; that he profited from the housing meltdown; that he has criticized our NATO allies and praised Russia; that most African Americans aren’t “living in hell,” and much more. And Ford Motor Co. said it wasn’t sending any American jobs to Mexico.
By any objective measure, Clinton won the debate. Her ideas, ability to express them, command of the facts and considerable poise stood in marked contrast to everything Trump offered.
Trump has praised himself as the ultimate dealmaker. But for anyone still trying to decide after Monday night, Hillary should have closed the deal.
This story was originally published September 28, 2016 at 8:31 AM with the headline "Debate should have closed the deal for Hillary."