Instead, Trump and his team let loose with a cacophony of conflicting messages to explain what happened Monday evening.

The Republican’s campaign alternately praised and blamed the moderator; insisted Trump went easy on Clinton out of respect to her family, and doubled down on his positions, such as his refusal to release his tax returns, that provided his Democratic opponent with her fruitful attacks.

All in all, Trump turned a 90-minute event that didn’t go that well but wasn’t fatal, into possibly a three-day spotlight on the key weaknesses jeopardizing his White House hopes.

It was a strategic blunder, some veteran campaign veterans concluded.

“48-hour window post-debate is often just as important as debate itself,” tweeted Republican strategist Kevin Madden, who experienced both the highs and lows of post-debate as top communications advisor to Mitt Romney four years ago.

ABC News political analyst Matthew Dowd, who advised President George W. Bush during his 2004 re-election bid, said the best thing Trump could do is let this one go and focus attention on his plans to do better 10 days from now.

Dowd said on Twitter that that strategy worked for Bush 12 years ago, after he lost his first debate with Democratic nominee John Kerry, now secretary of state.

“Trump supporters/surrogates/campaign would be much better off saying we lost and we will do better next time. Just be honest and move on,” he said.

Both Clinton and Trump declared victory post debate. And even though the initial evidence suggests Clinton might be more right in that regard, it’s standard practice for the candidate that comes up short to also claim the win.

And, Trump’s base was hardly dispirited. They pointed to unscientific online polls as proof that he won the debate. Meanwhile, Trump’s campaign announcing that it collected $18 million since Monday from both small and big donors, with the bulk of that raised Tuesday during a previously organized “national call day.”

However, Trump’s never had a problem energizing his base. That’s been Clinton’s problem and why her debate performance was such a boost to her campaign, it gave worried Democrats something to get excited about.

Trump’s challenge has been to clear the threshold that he is temperamentally fit and qualified for the presidency, and in doing so attract the additional voters he needs to win White House.

Breathing fresh life into Clinton’s attacks from the debate — on his treatment of women, how he’s run his business, his refusal to release his tax returns, and role in promoting the “birther” conspiracy that President Obama wasn’t eligible for the White House — undermines that goal.

Yet that’s exactly what Trump did on Tuesday morning during an interview on Fox News, when he voluntarily defended against Clinton’s attack that he once referred to an Hispanic Miss Universe candidate as overweight and “Miss Housekeeping.”

The interview ensured that the clip from the debate, among Trump’s worst moments, would get replayed all day on cable news, along side the celebrity billionaire trying to defend the indefensible.

“He should have left this alone,” said Brett O’Donnell, a Republican strategist who specializes in debate prep. “Trump needs to figure out what is defense and what is offense and stick to offense and quit taking the bait and being so defensive when attacked.”

Trump and his surrogates were all over the map in the spin room after the debate. Intended or not, the signal sent by their incoherence was that they knew he had the poorer debate, and was looking for ways of covering it up.

Rudy Giuliani, among Trump’s most loyal supporters and a part of the nominee’s inner circle, suggested that Trump might skip the remaining debates. The campaign later made clear he plans to participate.

Trump and his advisors initially praised moderator Lester Holt, the anchor of the NBC Nightly News. They later changed their tune and argued that he had tilted the scales in Clinton’s favor by subjecting the Republican to tougher questioning.

Trump also floated as an excuse that the microphone at his podium was defective. He speculated that this was so because there was a conspiracy to make him look bad. Trump at times could be heard breathing in through his nose while he spoke, a fact Democrats gleefully pointed out.

Trump has often reveled in misdirection and flooding the zone with competing narratives in order to keep media attention focused on him, and away from his opponent.

That approach worked in the Republican primary, were Trump’s dominance reduced the risk of him being tripped up by controversial rhetoric or mediocre debate performances that might have sunk a conventional candidate.

But that won’t necessarily work in a general election, where Trump has to win over a broader universe of voters to be successful.

There’s a “difference between the relatively few primary voters versus larger general electorate,” emailed Sarah Isgur Flores, who advised Carly Fiorina during the GOP primary and saw first hand how a debate performance can impact the trajectory of a campaign.

“The next-day spin is more impactful in general because you have lower propensity voters. In the primary, they are already a higher engaged sliver of the population.”