Second presidential debate: Trump vs. Clinton

Canada made a surprise appearance in a CNN health care debate between Senators Bernie Sanders and Ted Cruz on Tuesday night.

Cruz, claiming he knows a lot about Canada because he was born there, said Canadians leave their country in droves to seek out health care in the United States.

Climate change is one of the most critical issues facing humanity for, oh, the next 10,000 years, but we’ve barely heard about it in this presidential campaign. So let’s quickly recap the difference between Trump and Clinton on global warming. Because it’s really quite simple — and stark.

Clinton: Hillary Clinton wants to use various regulatory levers at the president’s disposal to nudge down US greenhouse gas emissions bit by bit. Tighten fuel-efficiency standards for vehicles here; plug methane leaks from natural gas infrastructure there. Defend President Obama’s Clean Power Plan to reduce CO2 from coal plants. Bolster appliance standards and building codes. Each individual regulation is penny-ante stuff, but it piles up. The aim is to ratchet down overall US emissions 26 to 28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025:

During Wednesday’s debate, Donald Trump repeated a claim that he’s made again and again this campaign: that he opposed the Iraq war before it started. But Trump is wrong. In 2002, Trump came out in favor of the Iraq War. And there’s ironclad, hard proof.

BuzzFeed’s Andrew Kaczynski and Nathan McDermott found evidence when they looked through old recordings of Trump on The Howard Stern Show back in February. They came up with one hell of a scoop from the September 11, 2002, episode:

Appearing on Chris Hayes’s MSNBC show on Monday night, New York magazine reporter Rebecca Traister best captured exactly what made the second presidential debate feel so … gross.

Here’s part of the transcript:

He’s beauty, he’s grace, he’s Mr. United States — or so the media and social media have dubbed Ken Bone, the red-sweater-clad darling of the second US presidential debate.

Bone was one of the self-declared undecided voters who made up the live audience, who were called upon to contribute questions to the debate’s town hall–style discussion. Bone’s question, which was about energy conservation and job creation, went mostly unheeded by the nation (well, except for Patton Oswalt) once it got a look at the person doing the asking:

How would American media cover recent events in the presidential election if they happened in another country? How would the world respond differently? Here, to borrow a great idea from Slate’s Joshua Keating, is a satirical take on the story you might be reading if Sunday’s presidential debate had taken place in, say, Iraq or Pakistan.

WASHINGTON — America’s imperiled democracy suffered a major blow on Sunday night, when right-wing presidential candidate Donald J. Trump threatened to jail his left-wing rival Hillary Clinton if he wins the country’s November election.

During Sunday night’s presidential debate, Donald Trump repeatedly dodged moderator Anderson Cooper’s attempts to call him out for bragging about sexual assault in leaked comments that surfaced on Friday. Trump dismissed the comments as “locker room talk,” pivoted to talking about ISIS, and talked about his “tremendous respect for women” before finally saying that, no, he had never actually done the things he talked about on the tape.

But in defending Trump after the debate, some of his surrogates went a lot further than just changing the subject or denying that Trump actually did the things he said he did. They denied that his comments could even be described as sexual assault in the first place.

Donald Trump is a master of the “I am rubber and you are glue” approach to political rhetoric, but at Sunday night’s presidential debate, he tried a novel variant on the strategy. After Anderson Cooper asked him point blank if he used his $916 million reported loss from his 1995 tax return to avoid income taxes in other years, Trump shot back that he did — but so did the fourth-richest man in the world and Hillary Clinton supporter Warren Buffett, whom Clinton had minutes earlier praised for his advocacy of higher taxes on the rich:

The day after, Buffett came out with a statement saying, in effect, bullshit. He has never used a carryforward, the technique Trump used to avoid taxes, and he has paid taxes every year since 1944, when he was 13 and paid $7 to fund World War II.

It’s clear Roger Stone, Donald Trump’s close ally and adviser, wants to bring the women against the Clintons forward — and he is willing to pay them to do it.

Stone’s Super PAC Stone reportedly paid Kathy Shelton — the Arkansas sexual assault victim whose alleged rapist Hillary Clinton defended in court — $2,500 to appear with Trump before the second presidential debate, according to the Chicago Tribune.

On Sunday night, during the second presidential debate, Donald Trump told Hillary Clinton that if he were president, “you would be in jail.”

It was a horrifying moment. It was the most authoritarian statement in a campaign that was already pretty authoritarian to begin with.

During Sunday night’s presidential debate, Donald Trump repeatedly dodged moderator Anderson Cooper’s attempts to call him out for bragging about sexual assault in leaked comments that surfaced on Friday.

Let’s be clear: “Sexual assault” is absolutely the right way to describe what Trump says on those tapes. It’s possible that Trump was boasting to Billy Bush in 2005 about something that didn’t happen, but when Trump claims he “can do anything” to women because he’s a star, including “grab ’em by the pussy,” he is describing sexual assault. That is what you call it when someone grabs a woman and touches her genitals without her consent.

It may have been the weirdest exchange of Sunday’s entire debate.

Donald Trump’s running mate, Mike Pence, had said just days earlier that the US should be prepared to bomb Syrian military targets to help protect residents of the besieged city of Aleppo. Moderator Martha Raddatz of ABC asked Trump if he agreed. Trump, without missing a beat, calmly threw Pence under the bus.

It’s time for round two. Hillary Clinton, coming off a decisive win at the first presidential debate, will face off with Donald Trump yet again at the second presidential debate on Sunday, October 9, at 9 pm.

The 90-minute debate — no commercial breaks — will be held at Washington University in St. Louis and moderated by CNN’s Anderson Cooper and ABC’s Martha Raddatz, an experienced foreign policy reporter who used to cover the Pentagon and the State Department, and a veteran debate moderator.

About 30 minutes into Sunday night’s debate, Donald Trump jumped erratically from a bit of free association about Bernie Sanders and WikiLeaks to suddenly declaring he’d jail Hillary Clinton if elected president.

As Vox’s Zack Beauchamp notes, this was extraordinary: Calling for your political opposition to be locked up is an unprecedented act in modern American political history.

Donald Trump was better in the second presidential debate than he was in the first, in that he didn’t let himself get distracted by Hillary Clinton’s attempts to bait him, and in that he mostly just spent the entire evening talking about whatever he wanted to talk about, instead of what he’d been asked about.

But I’m not sure any of that matters, whether you think he won on style, or lost on substance, or anything of the sort.

It will be a few more days before we get really methodologically rigorous polls measuring how the electorate felt about the second presidential debate, the impact of which will be intermingled with the Trump leaked tape scandal that broke two days earlier.

Still, the early indications suggest that Hillary Clinton has won — though less decisively than she won the first debate.

Donald Trump spent a lot of the second presidential debate complaining that the moderators were letting Hillary Clinton speak much more than him. At one point in the debate, Trump even described the event as “one on three” — “one” being Trump, and “three” being Clinton and debate moderators Anderson Cooper and Martha Raddatz.

Well, the numbers are in, and it turns out Trump actually got to speak more than Clinton throughout the debate. Trump spoke for about 40 minutes and 10 seconds, while Clinton spoke for about 39 minutes and 5 seconds.

It was clear going into the second presidential debate that this would be no ordinary political event. This would be huge. It would be the first time Donald Trump would have to defend his hot mic comments bragging about sexual assault in front of a hostile opposing candidate and tough moderators. It would be the defining moment of the election, a glorious train wreck. It would be “whatever the opposite of the moon landing is.”

And oh, dear reader, it was. It really, really was. It wasn’t like some past bombshell debates, with one catastrophic or shocking moment that overshadowed the rest. It was instead a continual disaster for Trump, a slow-boiling catastrophe with flare-ups and temper tantrums from the candidate but an enviable, consistent stream of madness.

Tonight’s second debate wasn’t just different because of its town hall format where undecided voters could pose questions directly to the candidates — it also marked a different debate strategy for Donald Trump.

Tonight Trump interrupted Hillary Clinton 18 times, and she only interrupted him once. But in the first debate, Trump interrupted Clinton 51 times compared to Clinton’s 17 interruptions.

Let’s not lower the bar for Donald Trump: President of the United States is a difficult job that requires wide-ranging knowledge of the American government and the myriad issues that land on the president’s desk. Nothing in Trump’s career suggests he is in any way prepared to do the job, and nothing he did in even the better moments of the second presidential debate suggested the existence of hidden depths of relevant knowledge and competence.

The most telling exchange of the second 2016 presidential debate came in the midst of an extended exchange over tax policy, about an hour of the way into the debate:

At Sunday’s debate, Donald Trump revealed that he is not running to be America’s president so much as its dictator.

The debate’s most unnerving moment came early. “If I win, I’m going to instruct the attorney general to get a special prosecutor to look into your situation, because there’s never been so many lies, so much deception,” Trump told Hillary Clinton.

The second presidential debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump took place on Sunday, October 9.

The debate, which is in St. Louis, Missouri, will last 90 minutes and be conducted in a “town hall” format featuring questions from undecided voters, moderated by CNN’s Anderson Cooper and ABC’s Martha Raddatz. And there will likely be a whole lot of discussion about Donald Trump’s leaked tape scandal, which broke Friday afternoon.

Round two: Amid controversy over a released hot mic recording revealing Donald Trump bragging about sexually assaulting women, the Republican nominee will face off with Hillary Clinton at the second presidential debate on Sunday, October 9, at 9 pm.

The 90-minute debate — no commercial breaks — will be held at Washington University in St. Louis and moderated by CNN’s Anderson Cooper and ABC’s Martha Raddatz, an experienced foreign policy reporter who used to cover the Pentagon and the State Department, and a veteran debate moderator.

Early in Sunday night’s presidential debate, Anderson Cooper directly confronted Donald Trump about the leaked recordings that threw his campaign into turmoil this weekend — accurately pointing out that in the recordings, Trump “bragged” that he had “sexually assaulted women.”

In typical fashion, Trump’s response avoided responsibility, minimizing the remarks as “locker room talk.”