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Well that was fun.
I admit starting the debate with butterflies in my stomach. For the first time I can recall in watching a debate, I was actually nervous. The kind of nervous I get before I go on TV, or speak before a crowd. Like many on the left, I fear this election is too close. And last night was a critically important moment.
Hillary, like the president of Mexico before her, looked Trump in the eye and he sniffed and blinked.
What was up with that, anyway? Trump was sniffling and snorting the entire evening, though he denied it this morning on Fox & Friends (yeah, even Fox noticed it). That was the same interview in which Trump thought it would be a good idea to double down on his fat-shaming of Miss Universe, Alicia Machado (who he reportedly once called Miss Housekeeping because she’s originally from Venezuela). Machado got her revenge by doing an ad last night, in Spanish:
Hillary was good. Really good. She looked good. Sounded good. Was even, dare I say it, likable. She knew her facts, wasn’t too wonky, politely paid attention to Trump while he was talking (while he looked all over the place, like a kid with ADD, while Hillary spoke), and refused to take his bait over and over again, while feeding him poisoned little fact-nuggets that he eagerly and naively bit into time and again.
Hillary ticked Trump off early. Watch Trump’s reactions while Hillary is speaking.
Then she got him for rooting for the housing crisis, and check out what he said in response:
All the focus groups thought Hillary won. All the polls I’ve seen put Hillary as the victor. (Trump won the fake online polls, the ones on Web pages where the same person can vote 100 times.)
Things went so badly for Trump that ended up claiming afterward that his mic was bad, and that somehow influenced the debate. (No one heard anything with Trump’s mic.) And Rudy Giuliani is now saying that maybe Trump shouldn’t show up for the next two debates, supposedly because moderator Lester Holt was “unfair” to Trump. Lester Holt was a potted plant last night. He let Trump ramble endlessly. And even when Holt did hold Trump accountable for his Iraq lie (Trump claims he was against the Iraq war, when in fact there’s audio showing Trump was for it), Trump then lied again, claimed the audio showed him saying “maybe,” when in fact the audio shows him saying “yeah.” Holt didn’t respond when Trump lied about what the audio said. Now you can debate whether Holt should have stood down at that point, but there’s no arguing with the fact that Holt could have done more fact-checking and he didn’t.
MSNBC this morning had the architect on who Trump allegedly stiffed on his bill. Trump last night said he didn’t pay the man because maybe he did a bad job. In fact, the architect released a letter of recommendation from Trump saying the man did a fabulous job.
Image courtesy of MSNBC.
Speaking of Trump’s truthiness, Politifact (one of the big fact-check organizations) did an analysis of the number of lies told by the candidates last night. Trump won by a landslide:
Image courtesy of MSNBC.
At one point, cybersecurity came up, and Trump defended the Russians against charges that they were responsible for hacking the DNC. It was bizarre. The Russian state propaganda organ immediately publicized Trump’s defense of Putin:
And here’s Hillary responding to Trump’s claim that she doesn’t have the stamina to be president (in fact, he said Hillary didn’t have the presidential “look,” then lied about having said it).
Trump was particularly awful when the subject came up of Trump having led the birther movement these past 8 years. Trump actually bragged about having done it.
Then Trump, oddly, claimed that Hillary has been fighting ISIS her entire adult life. Which would put the battle’s beginning to 1966. In fact, if we’re being generous, ISIS was founded in 1999. The Associated Press tweeted that it’s really more accurate to put the modern origins of ISIS to 2013.
The Washington Post did a wonderful summary this morning on all of the debate reaction, you can read it here. But here are a few gems:
“He was exciting but embarrassingly undisciplined,” writes New York Post conservative columnist John Podhoretz. “He began with his strongest argument — that the political class represented by her has failed us and it’s time to look to a successful dealmaker for leadership — and kept to it pretty well for the first 20 minutes. Then due to the vanity and laziness that led him to think he could wing the most important 95 minutes of his life, he lost the thread of his argument, he lost control of his temper and he lost the perspective necessary to correct these mistakes as he went. By the end … Trump was reduced to a sputtering mess blathering about Rosie O’Donnell and about how he hasn’t yet said the mean things about Hillary that he is thinking.”
This was perhaps my favorite:
“After the first 20 minutes, it may have been the most lopsided debate I’ve ever seen — and not because Clinton was particularly effective. But you don’t need to be good when your opponent is bad,” writes National Review’s David French, who considered running for president as an independent. “Why didn’t he have a better answer ready for the birther nonsense? Has he still not done any homework on foreign policy? I felt like I was watching the political Titanic hit the iceberg, back up, and hit it again. Just for fun.”
CNN’s snap poll wasn’t any kinder to Trump:
CNN’s Gloria Borger, who I really like, thought Trump “totally lost control of the debate.”
I’ll close with Hillary’s comments this morning on Trump’s claim that his microphone wasn’t working:
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