I’m not gonna lie, folks. I thought Trump was going to dominate the first presidential debate against Hillary Clinton. Not necessarily because he has a firmer handle on policy – he doesn’t, and I’m sure he’d readily admit that himself – but because his debate style tends to work, and it works really fuckin’ well.
It worked in the Republican primaries, where he basically ground his opponents into dust via a volley of insults, taunts and general bluster, which connected him immediately and viscerally with an audience that doesn’t feel like regular politicians are even listening to them anymore. Clinton represents that kind of politics to a tee, so I assumed that he’d cut through with that aggressive, overpowering showmanship we know so well.
But he… didn’t. Maybe buoyed by the common assumption of this race, Trump seemed to be angling from the start toward something a little more presidential: more focus on concrete policy ideas and less focus on giving his opponent incisive schoolyard nicknames and insulting their personal and physical traits.
That didn’t seem to work. Clinton has never been a great debate performer, but nobody can deny she knows her policy. And this time, she also knew something else: it’s very, very easy to get Trump riled up, and when you get him riled up on terms that aren’t his own, he tends to veer wildly off track. Even Trump supporters noticed early on that he was getting hot and bothered over minor jabs:
Trump is getting too loud and too hot. If I were him, I’d tone that down a notch.
— Ari Fleischer (@AriFleischer) September 27, 2016
Trump’s weakness on this front is that he is a massive narcissist – if you toss a criticism at him, especially a personal one, he needs to keep returning to it until he thinks it’s been fully addressed. When Clinton slapped him down for his dodgy business practices, he kept returning to that point, even when he was in the middle of an otherwise salient attack on her email scandal, which basically left the entire line of argument in the dirt.
For her part, Clinton was quite good at finding those weak spots which Trump had to defend himself on, but would ruin his self-image as a populist people’s champion. She went him on his personal strategy of minimising taxes, Trump replied that he “take[s] advantage of the laws of our nation,” which is not a great look when you’re trying to portray yourself as a hero of people who have been fucked over and left poor by trade agreements.
She was also quite good at being very exasperated after Trump went on one of his long spiels.
People on both sides had criticisms about moderator Lester Holt‘s light-touch approach to the proceedings – he let the candidates go on and on, mostly – but it was Trump who suffered for it. As I said, the bloke is simply not that great when it comes to policy, and the longer he talks the more obvious it becomes. I also said that this probably doesn’t matter a great deal for a huge portion of his base – but still. To a large portion of swing voters he probably looked like he was ranting and raving about nothing in particular.
On race, Trump looked like a massive cretin. It was one of the big ticket questions of the night, and Clinton immediately swooped in, arguing her current support of justice for African-Americans who believe the system has failed them, in contrast to Trump, who has been sued for systemic racial discrimination in his property leasing practices. Trump’s only defence was to dredge up Clinton’s (admittedly very bad) ‘super-predator’ remarks from the 1990s and to say that those kind of lending practices are common in the real estate industry. What? That is not a strong stance on anything.
I’m loathe to quote Newt Goddamn Gingrich here, but he made a pretty solid point on Twitter which I think conveys one of Trump’s central appeals:
Clinton is a fox who knows many things you can fact check. Trump is a hedgehog who knows one very big thing: We need change.
— Newt Gingrich (@newtgingrich) September 25, 2016
That’s Trump’s thing. As long as he keeps hammering on his central points – America is being screwed by China and Mexico, special interests are screwing politics, Clinton is corrupt and scheming, etc – he does well and speaks to a portion of the population Clinton isn’t even trying to touch on an emotional level.
But honestly? There wasn’t much of that today. What we got instead was Trump at his weakest: a jabbering, sweaty mess who lurched wildly from point to point and didn’t even trot out many of the crowd favourites (“HILLARY DID BENGHAZI!”) He said in a post-debate interview that he didn’t allude to Bill Clinton‘s myriad affairs – a usual talking point – out of respect for Chelsea Clinton, which is very strange.
Look, I’m not the only one who thinks Clinton won this one pretty resoundingly. A focus group of 20 undecided Florida voters by CNN found that 18 of them thought Clinton won. A focus group of Pennsylvania voters overwhelmingly thought Clinton had won. A poll of debate watchers by CNN/ORC, which found that 62 percent thought Clinton won and 27 percent thought Trump did.
Maybe most importantly, as Deadspin reports, members of white nationalist forum Stormfront – who are in the can for Trump, shockingly enough – weren’t particularly pleased with Ill Duce‘s performance, with one of them saying Hills “mopped the floor” with him, and another saying she “won on points”.
Personally, I think Trump is going to do a lot better in the next debates. If Clinton wants to win, she’s gotta be aware that he’s probably going to either be better prepped for the next debate, or more willing to stick to his usual debate mode – that bubbling mix of anger and “I don’t give a shit” attitude which decimated Ted Cruz, Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio almost effortlessly.
It’ll be a wild one. And look, if you wanna go back and watch this debate but can’t imagine wasting 90 minutes of your time, Bloomberg has churned it into 3 minutes. You’re welcome:
The first US presidential debate in 3 minutes https://t.co/VaF5eXkFn0 #debates2016 pic.twitter.com/ao7SelYmo0
— Bloomberg Politics (@bpolitics) September 27, 2016
Photo: Getty Images / Drew Angerer.
