Trump vs. Clinton: first presidential debate of 2016

Three presidential debates later and Donald Trump still seems to have no idea that black people live anywhere but the inner city.

In the final moment of the third presidential debate, Trump continued to link black and brown communities to America’s “disastrous” urban centers.

The next presidential debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump will take place on Wednesday, October 19, 2016. This will be the final of three planned debates between the two presidential nominees before the election, and it will be moderated by Chris Wallace of Fox News.

For decades now, these debates have been the marquee events of the general election season, since they’re often the only time the two major party nominees come face to face. Indeed, the first debate between Clinton and Trump in late September drew over 80 million viewers — and seems to have boosted Hillary Clinton in the polls.

The conventional wisdom about Donald Trump is that on the debate stage and off, he’s unpredictable — so unpredictable that Martin O’Malley, who challenged Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination, told the Atlantic’s James Fallows that Trump is like “a monkey with a machine gun.”

But the truth is that Trump’s 11 primary debates predicted his performance in the first presidential debate on September 26. In every debate appearance so far, he’s used a handful of tricks that, when they worked, did so because they aren’t the way politicians usually act.

In the first presidential debate, Donald Trump treated us to the spectacle of a man too lazy, undisciplined, and over-confident to bother preparing for an important moment.

So ahead of the second debate, Trump’s team is trying to get him to take it more seriously. For instance, Thursday night in New Hampshire they had Trump do an event in the town hall format rather than his usual rallies.

The past six days proved Donald Trump is dangerously unfit for the presidency.

The problem isn’t that Trump is cruel, though he is. The problem isn’t that Trump is boorish, though he is. The problem isn’t that Trump is undisciplined, though he is.

I spent Monday night clicking a button on my computer each time Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump interrupted each other (or host Lester Holt) during the first presidential debate.

I ended up clicking that button a whole lot.

In retrospect, it is incredible that the media consensus seems to be that Hillary Clinton won the debate — the expectations set up by pundits were so high for Clinton and so low for Donald Trump that it seemed like a no-win situation for the Democrat. Pundits said she should smile, not cough, not laugh, not condescend, show some levity, provide substance and entertainment, and more. Trump, meanwhile, just had to not lie and fill the gaps about his policy proposals.

On her show Wednesday night, Samantha Bee summed up the expectations of Clinton: “Be perfect but not too perfect. Save us from fascism but, like, don’t be a bitch about it.” In comparison, Bee said, “No one was suggesting superficial changes for Trump — like try wearing a suit that actually fits or embrace your baldness proudly or don’t snort your way through the debate like Jean-Pierre’s prized truffle pig.”

During the presidential debate on Monday, Donald Trump claimed that the end of New York City’s stop-and-frisk policy led to a rise in murders, and Hillary Clinton claimed that a judge declared the policy unconstitutional.

The New York City Police Department apparently took issue with both of these claims:

Hillary Clinton debated circles around Donald Trump during Monday night’s presidential debate. She had prepared, coherent answers, while Trump had unprepared, chaotic word salad. She subtly baited him into flying off the handle and loudly interrupting her, while she kept smiling and maintained her cool. It was a masterful performance.

But for many women watching the debate, it was also a frustrating reminder of just how hard Clinton has to work to overcome sexist double standards — and how hard most women have to work every day to do the same.

Why was Donald Trump so frequently unfocused and rambling during the first general election debate? According to a new report from the New York Times’s Patrick Healey, Ashley Parker, and Maggie Haberman based on campaign sources, it’s basically because he wasn’t really into practicing.

The Times reports that Trump really, really didn’t like traditional debate prep — the format where you stand up at a podium and, you know, practice debating. So he instead focused “mostly on conversations and discussions with advisers.”

The general consensus in the polls and media is Hillary Clinton won the first presidential debate against Donald Trump. But Trump doesn’t agree with the consensus. And to the extent it’s right, he already came up with an excuse to explain his potential loss: It was the microphone.

Trump first voiced the excuse almost immediately after the debate ended — in the so-called “spin room”: “They also gave me a defective mic. Did you notice that? My mic was defective within the room. … I wonder, was that on purpose?” He later told Fox and Friends, “When I tested it, it was beautiful — like an hour before. I said, ‘What a great mic.’ … It was much lower than hers. I don’t want to believe in conspiracy theories, of course, but it was much lower than hers and it was crackling, and she didn’t have that problem.”

A focus group of young voters overwhelmingly said Hillary Clinton won Monday night’s presidential debate, according to John Della Volpe, who studies youth voter trends at the Harvard Institute of Politics.

Della Volpe and the Institute of Politics interviewed about 60 voters ages 18 to 29 from across the country to gauge their reactions to the high-profile debate. Like other post-debate focus group polls, it’s a small sample that may not reflect larger post-debate polls.

At least 80.9 million Americans tuned in Monday night to watch Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton go head to head in the first presidential debate of 2016, making it the most-watched presidential debate in American history.

But it doesn’t come close to surpassing the 112 million Americans who watched the Super Bowl last year, and it is only slightly more than the 80.6 million Americans who watched Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter debate in 1980. What’s more, it doesn’t come close to topping optimistic projected viewership of 100 million.

Donald Trump wants America to know that he’s smart. When pressed, he’ll cop to being greedy and even a bit dishonest in his past dealings. He’ll admit he’s said inflammatory things over the course of his campaign and even kinda sorta maybe apologize for some of them. But he’s a smart guy. A rich guy. A savvy operator who wants America — or at least a certain slice of America — to believe he’s now going to be on their side.

But in Monday night’s debate he not only revealed himself to be a bit of an ignorant, blustering fool. He also showed that he’s not nearly as shrewd as he likes to think he is by stumbling into an elaborate trap: Alicia Machado.

Donald Trump got his start in politics peddling the idea that Barack Obama was born abroad. He built his successful Republican primary campaign on a similar form of white identity politics, married to a deep and hard-line skepticism of immigration. That’s been his biggest single issue — deriding Mexicans as rapists and murderers, promising to deport 11 million undocumented immigrants, and threatening to ban Muslims from entering the country.

At Monday night’s debate, he had the perfect opportunity to tee off on these racially charged themes. Hillary Clinton had just fielded a question about “implicit bias” in policing, arguing that police needed “retraining” to deal with deep-seated psychological prejudices against African Americans.

Here is the conventional wisdom about last night’s presidential debate, as I understand it. Hillary Clinton won in a rout, but that’s largely because Donald Trump flagged after an excellent first 30 minutes in which he hammered away at his strongest issue: trade.

“Donald Trump won the first 25 minutes of the first presidential debate,” writes Ross Douthat at the New York Times, in a representative piece. “He was too bullying and shout-y, too prone to interrupt, but he seized on an issue, trade, where Hillary Clinton was awkward and defensive, and he hammered away at his strongest campaign theme: linking his opponent to every establishment failure and disappointment, and trying to make her experience a liability rather than a strength.”

The first rule of debating Donald Trump is to not try to play his game, because you will lose. You cannot win a shouting match with Trump. You cannot force him to back down and admit that, actually, you’re right. Confront him with the worst parts of his record, and he’ll deny it in the face of evidence. He might not come out of the exchange looking good, but neither will you.

So Hillary Clinton, at the first presidential debate on Monday night, didn’t try. Instead, she came armed with invisible barbs that were likely to get under Trump’s skin.

Toward the end of Monday night’s presidential debate, Donald Trump released a torrent of incoherent words that seemed to revolve in some fashion around … Rosie O’Donnell?

Parsing the sentence, Trump appears to be referring to one of Clinton’s most recent attack ads, in which a series of young girls look sadly at themselves in a mirror as various sexist Trump sound bites play: “She’s a slob,” “Does she have a good body? No,” and so on.

At first, users on a 4chan forum — home to the many racist, sexist, and anti-Semitic memes and political commentary of the alt-right — were sharing meaningless live online polls showing Donald Trump’s success last night.

It was clear to them that Trump had won the debate, even though mainstream pundits’ opinions seemed to be coalescing around the idea that his opponent, Hillary Clinton, had trounced him.

Donald Trump insists he won the presidential debate on Monday night. And to prove it, he’s pointing to the polls.

Hillary Clinton also insists she won the debate. And to prove it, she too is pointing to the polls.

Monday night, Hillary Clinton demonstrated a strong contrast against Donald Trump in terms of preparation and knowledge, puncturing Trump’s reality show bubble and disheartening conservatives who’d gone all in on the theory that she’s since such a flawed candidate she might lose to an ignorant boor.

It’s time to stop being surprised by this.

Donald Trump loves an audience.

But during his first debate with Hillary Clinton, he didn’t have one that could audibly respond to what he was saying — and the strain of trying to play to a mostly silent room quickly set him spinning.

It will be a few more days before we get methodologically rigorous polls measuring how the electorate felt about the first presidential debate. The indicators we have so far are necessarily incomplete and limited — they’re focus groups of tiny, hand-picked samples of undecided voters, polls of people who watched the debate rather than the electorate at large, and plain punditry.

Still, what we have so far points toward a Hillary Clinton victory.

At Monday night’s presidential debate, Hillary Clinton took Donald Trump to task for his many sexist comments, like calling women pigs, slobs, and dogs. And one anecdote in particular stood out: Clinton said Trump had called former Miss Universe winner Alicia Machado, who is Latina, “Miss Housekeeping” and “Miss Piggy.”

“Where did you find this?” Trump interrupted more than once as Clinton told the story.