Donald Trump is a terrible champion for Republicans for many reasons—the recently released 2005 audio tape reveals the most egregious one. But his performance in Sunday’s debate in St. Louis against an ineffective Hillary Clinton demonstrated just how ill-equipped Trump is to challenge the weakest Democratic nominee in decades.
Despite Clinton giving him ample opportunity to make effective critiques of her and Barack Obama’s Democratic party, Trump instead missed opportunities and launched muddled attacks on his opponent. Trump’s tendency to make incomplete, stream-of-consciousness arguments that leave out important context served him poorly against a rival who was less adept than at the first presidential debate in parrying tough questions about her record.
Here’s an example from early in the debate Sunday. When asked about her private email server, Clinton once again expressed contrition for the whole set-up while stating there is no evidence any classified material ended up in the “wrong hands” because of her unsecure server. “I take classified materials very seriously and always have,” she said.
A competent opponent might have followed up with a cogent rebuttal to Clinton’s problematic defense. This hypothetical candidate might have pointed out that her initial claim about her email scheme—that none of the emails that passed through her server contained classified information—was proven to be false. That her justification that no classified information was obtained by enemies of the United States doesn’t absolve her of the foolish decision to set up the server—nor does it prove for certain that enemies did not obtain information. That her claim that she takes “classified materials very seriously” is laughable given the inherent risk in using a private email server as the nation’s top diplomat.
Instead, here’s how Trump responded. “And yet she didn’t know the word, the letter C on a document. Right? She didn’t even know what that word, what that letter meant,” he said. But how many persuadable undecided voters knew what Trump meant? He made no attempt to explain that Clinton had told the FBI she was unaware the letter C on State Department documents referred to a “confidential” classification, did not point out this was a dubious claim by the former secretary of state, and failed to make the obvious conclusion: Hillary Clinton tells unbelievable lies in order to protect herself. Instead, he deployed the mangled talking point and moved on.
This happened more than once Sunday night. During an exchange about Obamacare, Trump was asked if his plan would include a mandate that all Americans purchase health insurance. In the middle of his answer, in which he said he would introduce more competition in insurance markets, Trump threw in an aside: “President Obama, by keeping those lines, the boundary lines around each state, it was almost gone until just very toward the end of the passage of Obamacare, which, by the way, was a fraud. You know that, because Jonathan Gruber, the architect of Obamacare, was said—he said it was a great lie, it was a big lie.”
Trump never explained why Obamacare is a fraud or why the architect of the law said it was. The reference to Jonathan Gruber—a familiar name to Fox News viewers who heard a lot about his on-camera boasting that the bill was rewritten to sell it to “stupid” American voters—was a distraction at worst and a waste of time at best. And Trump did not even try to use the original question about Obamacare, which came from an undecided voter in the audience, to make a sustained argument against the law and the Democratic party that unified behind it. It’s a potent pocketbook issue for lots of Americans, and it’s one where Clinton and the Democrats have to play defense. Instead, Trump ran a trick play for one yard, then took a knee for the next three downs.
The good news for Republicans and conservatives is that if the current trend of the race continues and Clinton does win, it won’t be because she won the argument on policy and leadership. The bad news is that when given the chance to defeat a flawed candidate from a tired party with failed ideas, the GOP flubbed it by nominating Trump.
