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Clinton/Trump Debate Wrap Up
This is a preview from Tuesday morning’s The Daily Shot newsletter. Subscribe here free of charge.
In case you live under a rock or something, on Monday night Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton met for the first of three presidential debates. Beforehand, those in the know estimated 100 million people would watch. If you were not one of them, you are to be congratulated. To call it awful would be an exercise in hyperbolic understatement. It was utterly soul sucking. If for some reason (like, you hate yourself) you want to read a transcript, it can be found here.
So what happened?
Well, Clinton made the first attack of the evening (about Trump getting a loan from his father), one of a few prepared lines designed to get a rise out of him. But at the beginning of the debate, Trump put on his serious, squinty face and was calm and controlled.
But around the 20-minute mark, the wheels started to come off the whole thing and the two really started to mix it up. If Clinton played the grandmother-card within the first 15 seconds of speaking, Trump played the protectionist card within the first five. He pounded Clinton over her prior support of the TPP. She gave some double-talk response that didn’t really work.
Speaking of things that didn’t work, Clinton tried to deploy a canned line about how Donald’s tax proposals were “Trumped-up trickle-down.” Twice she tried to use that and twice it fell flat. (It’s 2016, nobody knows what trickle-down is anymore. You gotta imagine Clinton came up with that one herself and insisted on using it over the strenuous objections of her staff.)
Trump was on the receiving end of a number of hard questions from moderator Lester Holt. Among other things, Trump was pressed about releasing his tax returns. He gave the same line he’s been using about an ongoing audit, and when Holt pressed him, Trump said he’d release them when Clinton released her 33,000 deleted emails. Clinton pounced, saying that Trump probably hadn’t paid any taxes at all and insisted he had something to hide.
When it was time to talk about race, Clinton went into a routine about how we need to “restore trust between communities and the police,” and some stuff about “the plague of gun violence.” Trump did his law-and-order and inner-cities-are-wastelands shtick. He also repeated his support of stop-and-frisk, and included a bit about prohibiting people on no-fly lists from getting guns.
Holt also asked Trump about birtherism. Trump pointed the finger at Hillary Clinton. She worked past that and claimed that Trump’s birtherism was racist. He hit her back for being “holier than thou” and damned her for deploying birtherism against Obama in the 2008 primary.
When they reached the “Securing America” segment, Clinton was asked about cyber attacks and how to defend against them. She straight up accused Russia of hacking the DNC and promised as President to hit Russia back. Trump defended the Russians, claimed it might have been hacked by some guy who weighs 400 pounds, and then brought up the Sanders stuff from the DNC leaks.
Holt pressed Trump on claiming he opposed the Iraq War ahead of time, which Trump tried to explain away (appealing to Sean Hannity as an authority). Trump and Holt got into it and Clinton just sat back and watched, wearing her biggest, creepiest smile.
Okay, so who won? The general consensus is that Trump won the first third or so, Clinton won the second third, and the last part belonged to nobody. But, as always, who wins will depend on what happens in the next few days. And even if the consensus ends up as a Trump or a Clinton victory, well, Mitt Romney handily won the first debate last time around, and look where he is now.
This is a preview from Tuesday morning’s The Daily Shot newsletter. Subscribe here free of charge.
Published in General
So, for LaRoche, it’s cheerleaders. For you, push-ups.
I’m happy to have not watched a rigged debate between two inveterate liars. But thanks for the recap anyway.
My Twitter feed, which I do not use for politics and so is full of hippies, gave the match to Clinton, of course. BloombergTV and other organizations were doing live “fact checking” to ensure Trump was hammered on every utterance. That “trumped up trickle-down” line was gleefully repeated by sycophants.
Cello. Thanks! It’s my first time playing B the K and I am crazy about it. I’m a huge fan of The Great American Songbook and all things pop, but Copland reminds me why I’m glad I play a (mostly) classical instrument.
You’re kidding! Happy birthday George.
I’m guessing 2CELLOS is pretty much single-handedly responsible for insertion of the “mostly.”
OH my… I haven’t watched the latest video so I had no idea Max straightened his hair.
I totally agree. When we were watching it last night I made a similar point to my wife: “He should say, ‘sorry for all this sniffing. I have a cold. I thought you should all know, just in the interest of full disclosure. It’s ok, though, I’m going to power through it.’ “
As I recall, the networks regularly switched the colors for each party back and forth between red and blue with each presidential election (Republicans blue one cycle, red the next, etc.) It just so happened that the 2000 election was a Republican red year, and with all of the red state/blue state talk the colors got locked in place, in historical reverse. Drives me absolutely crazy to have the nominally conservative side associated with red, but I don’t see it ever changing.
Trump had every opportunity to win this and squandered it. The man needs to prepare for the next debate. You can’t wing these things.
He doesn’t even use the correct term for “stop, question, and frisk,” completely conceding to the leftist slander of this effective program through manipulation of language (their go-to tactic).
He bulldozed over Lester Holt’s attempt to say that stop & frisk is unconstitutional. To quibble over the name of the practice seems silly to me. The common term is stop & frisk. When you say stop & frisk, everyone knows what you’re talking about. What’s important is that Trump stopped Holt cold and set the record straight on the constitutionality question…