Fireworks! Going into the debate, the question seemed to be whether Donald Trump would survive as the Republican presidential candidate. My sense is that he substantially improved his chance of doing so.
He managed to field tough questions about the 2005 tapes by pivoting, somewhat frantically, to substantive issues. He managed to attack Hillary Clinton for her response to the women accusing Bill Clinton of rape or other sexual involvement — although he went over the top, in my judgment, by interjecting that he would put her in jail.
Trump reportedly didn’t put in much time for debate prep, but he had many more facts and figures at his command, though with his sloppy speech patterns he was vulnerable occasionally to correction by fact-checkers.
He was careful to sound Republican themes much more frequently than he did in the first debate. He went after Obamacare harshly, though he remained vague about what he would replace it with. He hit Clinton for favoring entry of additional refugees from Syria without, he said, proper (“extreme”) vetting. As in the first debate, he hit her on taxes. He criticized her and Obama on Syria and on their support of withdrawal from Iraq which, he said, enabled the Islamic State to grow and spread. He hit her for calling half his supporters “deplorables” and “irredeemable.”
He apparently scored very strongly in Frank Luntz’s focus group in his attacks, complete with sarcastic interjections, on Clinton’s private mail server. Her assurance that there’s no evidence that classified material from them has been hacked — an assurance that flies in the face of the assessments of FBI Director James Comey and other experts that they almost surely have been, that the server was less secure than Gmail — fell flat.
Trump issued shout-outs to Bernie Sanders voters. He was specific in highlighting her comments in the recently released transcripts of her speeches to bank executives. He even brought in the defenestrated Democratic National Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz. He repeated his claim, disputed by the moderator, to have opposed the Iraq War from the beginning, although I wonder why he didn’t simply make the statement, impervious to hostile fact-checking, that he opposed the Iraq War before she did.
Trump deliberately separated himself from his vice presidential candidate Mike Pence. A response to the comments by some Republicans that he should withdraw in Pence’s favor?
My sense is that Trump’s performance was good enough to stall what has been this weekend a growing cascade of demands that he withdraw from the race. It doesn’t seem likely that he eliminated what seemed to be the growing polling gap between him and Hillary Clinton. But he may have reversed the trend.
