Well. That was definitely a thing. I’m not sure what kind of thing it was, but it definitely was one.
The first debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump was actually very exciting and almost substantial. Here’s my short take.
Clinton: After being constantly told to smile more, Clinton seems to have overdid the advice a bit, smiling even when it was quite obvious that she wanted to go full Louis Black on Trump’s ass. It was still a pleasant contrast to Trump in split screen with his (sorry, feminists) Resting Bitch Face.
What actually impressed me is where she went after Trump on all the issues where people have been waiting on the press to grill him for years. Like, how can he say that he knows how to manage money when he’s stiffed most of his contractors in Atlantic City? She did defend her record – not that well, but less defensively than she did with Matt Lauer. And in head-to-head comparison with Trump, it wasn’t that hard to look good.
Trump: Seriously, WHAT THE FUCK WAS WITH THE SNIFFING???
To me, Chump’s best moment was challenging Clinton on an email scandal where any other official in the same situation would have been at least censured. It was also a good ante to say he would (finally) release his tax returns IF Clinton releases the “33,000 deleted emails.” It’s just by this point, it comes off as Boy Who Cried Wolf. We already know how Trump reacts to a challenge. If the birther thing is any guide, if Hillary somehow releases deleted data, he’s gonna bullshit continuously for three more years regardless before finally conceding the issue in such a way as to blame the Democrats for him making himself look stupid in the first place.
The other problem being that half of what this guy says is what Freudians would call “projecting.” Trump says (with some accuracy) that Clinton and the Obama Administration didn’t stop the spread of ISIS, but his main policy seems to be hitting up allies like NATO and Japan for extra money to cover their treaty obligations or we’ll pull out of them. He said, “I also have a much better temperament than she has” – which might have been the biggest laugh line of the night. And then, apparently thinking that he’d hit on some magic mantra to invoke Clinton’s 9/11 collapse, he said, “She doesn’t have the Stamina. I said she doesn’t have the STAMINA. To be president, you have to have the STA-MI-NA.”
Yeah, whatever you say, Sniffy.
Sad thing (for anybody who has issues with the Democrats) is that Trump did, again, have the opportunity to score some serious points on Clinton, over the emails, over ISIS, and all he could do was bluster and insult without giving a serious answer as to what he would do better. But then when confronted with his own venality, Trump doesn’t rely on a Big Lie technique. He relies on a Golden BB technique. This is basically where you fire so much rapid-fire bullshit downrange that there’s no way anybody can dodge it all. The drawback is that people get a bit… tired of it. Like when Lester Holt said, “we need to move ON…” Whereas when confronted about her issues, Clinton downplays them. Like, “I did apologize for the term ‘superpredators’, let’s move on.” Or, “Yes, I voted for Iraq, and I helped President Obama stage a withdrawal. Let’s move on.” She has to do this, because apparently unlike Trump, she is aware that the press has this new Weird Science invention called videotape that they can use to compare what you just said to what you said then.
The media conventional wisdom was that Hillary just needed to be competent and professional and also pleasant in demeanor, while Trump just needed to speak words good not drool. My estimation is that Clinton somewhat exceeded expectations and Trump somewhat disappointed his.