FARMVILLE, Va. — Hillary Clinton is expecting a tame, focused Donald Trump in the second presidential debate, her campaign manager said Tuesday.
Robby Mook pointed to recently released videos of Trump giving a deposition for a lawsuit involving one of his hotels as an example of who Clinton is preparing to face in the second presidential debate, set for Sunday in St. Louis.
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In those tapes, the Republican nominee is calm, affable and accommodating — nothing like the smug, thin-skinned politician that showed up for the first presidential debate last Monday in Hempstead, N.Y.
“We are expecting him to be better prepared for the next debate,” Mook told reporters prior to the vice presidential debate. “We all saw those deposition tapes; we know that there is a calm, cool and collected Donald Trump that can show up and we expect that that’s what will happen.”
Trump was controlled and on-message for the first 20 to 30 minutes of the first presidential debate. But the more Clinton attacked him over his record as a real estate developer, his past treatment of women and other issues, the more Trump unraveled.
Clinton’s most lethal attacks focused on Trump’s refusal to make his tax returns public, breaking decades of precedent for major party nominees and referring to one-time Miss Universe contestant Alicia Machado as “Miss Piggy” and “Miss Housekeeping.”
Trump made matters worse by following up the debate by days of insisting on defending himself, keeping them alive in the news cycles and driving down his position in public opinion polls.
Trump also threatened to retaliate by using the next debate to target Clinton by raising President Bill Clinton’s past marital infidelities.
Mook said he believes that those threats are misdirection on Trump’s part, although it’s possible that he’s trying to bait Trump into discussing the topic, which could boost Clinton by making her appear sympathetic.
“He has stated that he intends to make all kinds of salacious attacks; we actually don’t expect that. We think that he understands that that’s not the right strategy. A number of his advisers have said that,” Mook said.
In addition to reacting poorly to Clinton’s attacks, Trump blew the debate by failing to raise many of the topics that on which his Democratic opponent is vulnerable.
Trump hardly mentioned Libya and the Benghazi terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2012, which occurred during Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state. He could have done a better job of criticizing Clinton for using a private email server during that time, among other things.
Mook said that Clinton doesn’t expect that to happen again.
“We absolutely invite the opportunity to have a more issue-focused debate and we hope that’s what we’ll have,” he said.
The Sunday evening debate, on the campus of Washington University in St. Louis, is town hall style, which the Clinton team believes she excels. The event will only be the second one-on-one debate Trump has ever participated in.
