How Hillary Clinton Played Trump for a Fool
Before Monday night’s debate, we all read that
Hillary Clinton was planning to bait
Donald Trump and that Donald Trump was
blowing off debate practice. Two typical responses from jaded readers: 1) If that were Clinton’s real plan, she’d be hiding it. 2) Trump is obviously trying to set expectations low.
But never underestimate the power of incompetence. As it turns out, the pre-debate leaks seem to have been accurate: Clinton baited Trump, and Trump showed up unprepared. So what happened then? Clinton won. If we were to write it as a play:
Clinton campaign pre-debate: We’re going to bait Trump and make him lose his cool.
Trump campaign pre-debate: Whatever.
Hillary Clinton: Bait.
Trump: Loses cool.
All of this was undoubtedly a relief to supporters of Clinton and opponents of Trump, but it was also astonishing. Trump’s performance was, as political strategist
David Axelrod noted on CNN afterward, “inexplicable.” For Trump to win, he had to do one thing: look sane. What he did: look not sane. He had to follow a simple set of rules: stay on message; have a prepared response to the obvious attacks; and keep his wits about him when baited. What he did: go off message, offer zero prepared responses, and
lose his cool over the bait—every time.
Clinton’s lines of attack against Trump were entirely predictable, based on things well covered in the news: his business disputes, his tax secrecy, his comments about women, and his birtherism. Often, the best response from Trump would have been to ignore it. Otherwise, the best approach would have been to trot out some rehearsed response. Instead, he jumped wildly at every wave of the cape, or he offered an improvised mess.
Lester Holt took a lot of abuse from Clinton supporters on Twitter for failing to step in more often. But the result was illuminating. Clinton would let Trump speak, and Trump would interrupt and hector Clinton throughout her statements, responding to every needling. The more Trump did this, the more rope Holt provided, allowing Trump to coil it tightly around his own neck. Meanwhile, viewers were treated to a long Trumpian monologue about how Clinton’s campaign launched birtherism, keeping the focus on something harmful to him. They saw Trump defend himself regarding a 43-year-old civil rights lawsuit by saying it was settled “without an admission of guilt,” as if that would put things to rest. They saw Trump go off on a long riff on cyber security and fail to notice any chance to ding Clinton, whose emails were not at all properly secured.
When Trump was given a question about a specific issue, he often veered off on odd tangents. I’d have to replay the tape to give an example of how topics segued into one another, but it was incoherent enough that at one point, after a long and digressive rant by Trump against his opponent, all Clinton had to do to get laughs was say, with a smile, “Whew, okay…”, and do a
near-shimmy at her podium. Nor is it a good sign when you say, as Trump did, “I think my strongest asset, maybe by far, is my temperament,” and the audience breaks out in laughter.
You’ll notice that the focus here hasn’t been on Clinton. That’s not because she wasn’t important or because she’s undeserving of attention. But Clinton did exactly what anyone would have expected: she showed up prepared and, after initial nervousness, gained confidence. By 30 minutes in, she was in the zone and enjoying herself. Her sanctimony on the birther issue, among others, was hard for this viewer to take, given her memorably ugly campaign against
Barack Obama in 2008. But Hillary Clinton is Hillary Clinton. Her shortcomings are known. They faded into the background as Trump grabbed all the attention.
What does this mean? If Trump’s polls keep going up after this week, then the discontent in the nation is even greater than most of us realize. But it’s likelier that the galloping polls of Trump come to a halt. All he needed to do was prove to viewers that he could act presidential for 90 minutes. All Clinton needed to do was prove that he couldn’t. And she succeeded.
http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/09/how-hillary-clinton-played-trump-for-a-fool-debate
