Hillary Clinton set out to do Donald Trump the biggest favor she could Monday night: Depict him as a normal Republican.
One of her opening proposals at the debate was to say the wealthy will pay its “fair share” of taxes and Congress will close “corporate loopholes”, the stale dinner rolls of the Democratic party’s economic buffet. In her first rebuttal, she served up the Salisbury steak: “[T]he kind of plan that Donald has put forth would be trickle-down economics all over again,” she said, calling Trump’s particular cut “trumped-up trickle-down”.
To her right was the most unorthodox presidential nominee in memory, and she began attacking him like he was Mitt Romney.
Clinton then brought up “where we were eight years ago … the Great Recession, the worst since the 1930s … [t]hat was in large part because of tax policies that slashed taxes on the wealthy, failed to invest in the middle class, took their eyes off of Wall Street, and created a perfect storm.” We can’t revert to all of that, Clinton said.
Okay, not Mitt Romney—John McCain.
It was a discordant approach, given Trump’s unique vulnerabilities and own kind of moderate Republicanism: certainly well to the right on taxes, yes, but in favor of borrowing for infrastructure spending, against entitlement reform, ambiguous on health care, and restrained on foreign intervention.
And it benefited Trump, who took advantage of the old lines of attack to fittingly describe Clinton and her political ilk as old and ineffective: “Secretary Clinton and others, politicians, should have been doing this for years, not right now,” he said of their failure to fortify the U.S. economy, “because of the fact that we’ve created a movement. They should have been doing this for years.” He set the tone for the debate’s opening 15 minutes with assertive talk about trade and attacks against her and former President Clinton’s record, which she defended feebly.
“Well, that’s your opinion,” she said to Trump at one point. The Dude couldn’t have put it any better.
The debate shifted in Clinton’s favor only when Trump began to overplay his hand—”No wonder you’ve been fighting ISIS your entire life,” he joked a short time later, surely causing self-serious fact-checkers to order bottle service—and moderator Lester Holt turned the questioning to Trump’s behavior outside his political platform.
Had the pivot not happened, Trump may have departed New York a new Republican: somehow, someway, a somewhat normal one.
