As Dennis Green once said of the Chicago Bears, through three presidential debates Hillary Clinton was who we thought she was. But was Donald Trump?
Now that the debates are safely in the rear view mirror, we can evaluate some of the conventional wisdom about the Republican nominee’s performance.
Trump is not a 90-minute debater. Green might have admonished his teams to play 60 minutes of football. Surely, Kellyanne Conway tried to impress upon her boss the importance of a full hour and a half debate performance.
Republican debate prep coach Brett O’Donnell told me that Trump was “like a comedian who can tell one or two jokes well and then gets sent out to perform for an hour.” This didn’t matter in the unwieldly GOP debates because there were usually enough people on the stage for Trump to disappear and reappear as suited him, but it became an issue against Clinton.
Trump improved in each of the three debates. And even in his worst debate, he turned in a solid first 30 minutes. The problem is that he was out of material for the final hour, and often seemed to lose his cool.
Whether it was a lack of preparation or the lack of “stamina” for which Trump rapped Clinton, it hurt him.
Policy wasn’t really his Achilles’ heel. As expected, Clinton had a much firmer grasp of policy details and at times Trump seemed overmatched. But these exchanges never really played a big role in the debates.
In fact, on Trump’s core issues like trade, Clinton seemed hesitant to engage him. She would either try to expose contradictions between his stated concerns about American jobs going overseas and his business practices or get back to the more familiar territory of Republicans cutting taxes for the rich.
Even on foreign policy, where Clinton was a former secretary of state running against a political neophyte who had been widely criticized by world leaders, she mostly focused on his supposed bromance with Russian President Vladimir Putin. There are serious issues to be raised in that area, to be sure, but she mostly settled for trash-talking.
The most policy-focused debate, the one that took place Wednesday night with the capable Chris Wallace as moderator, was arguably Trump’s best. Talking about the Supreme Court, abortion, gun control and immigration with Clinton made him seem like a normal presidential candidate, even if he wasn’t always articulate or attuned to the minutiae.
Granted, some of this had to do with the fact that Trump has been so buffeted by sexual assault allegations since the “Access Hollywood” tape came out that headlines about Roe v. Wade being overturned were preferable to some of the alternatives. Nevertheless, it’s not what people expected going into the debates.
The first debate was the worst debate, and it mattered most. It’s hard to remember now, but Trump actually had a good September polling-wise. He pulled even with or ahead of Clinton both nationally and in many battleground states, potentially expanding his map to include Colorado and Maine’s second congressional district. The first debate, not “Access Hollywood,” really was the turning point.
Two big caveats are in order. The Trump tape likely stepped on any momentum that might have come from Mike Pence besting Tim Kaine in the vice presidential debate. And the allegations of unwanted advances or worse kept Trump’s improvements in the second debate from mattering.
Trump needed to hit the first debate out of the park, especially in light of everything that was to come later. He didn’t and he’s paid the price.
Trump the temperamental. The Donald displayed solid political instincts during the GOP debates. But most of his opponents were afraid to attack him, or in Jeb Bush’s case, just not very good at it. By the time the more skillful Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio got around to it, Trump was already too far ahead.
When the general election rolled around, Clinton not only knew what Trump’s biggest negatives were but also his biggest weakness: his thin skin. Trump needs to answer every charge, even when they are unanswerable, at the expense of talking about issues that can actually help him.
Since ditching the teleprompter, we’ve seen Trump devote entire rallies to disparaging the women who have come forward to accuse him in the process of denying the allegations, all where a one-sentence denial and then a renewed focus on Clinton would do.
This really proved his undoing in the debates. Even as he improved at pivoting, he could not keep himself from speculating at length about his accusers’ motivations, refusing to say he’d concede the election if defeated and blurting out, “Such a nasty woman” regarding his opponent at a time when his low standing among women is his biggest electoral problem.
Clinton was pedestrian but made few mistakes. As her lead grew, she also needed to do less in each debate. She hit that low bar with ease while rattling Trump at times and making him look small.
If you want to go ahead and crown her, crown her. But she was who we thought she was and Trump let her off the hook.
