Trump Lost the Battle Against Himself
Like countless other viewers, I wondered which Donald Trump would show up to debate Hillary Clinton: hyper Donald or sedate Donald.
Hyper Donald is the one we usually see on the campaign trail screaming himself hoarse or delighting crowds with his ad-libbed speeches like a stand-up comedian. Hyper Donald is the one we usually read in snarky Twitter tweets that he sends out almost daily.
Sedate Donald is the one whose impulses constantly pose a challenge to his advisers as they urge him to stick to his Teleprompter.
After boasting that he wasn't going to spend a lot of time preparing himself for his first debate with his Democratic opponent, the Republican nominee's lack of preparation and impulse control showed themselves, as Trump might say, "big league."
He apparently had prepared himself enough to stick to his talking points for about the first 15 minutes of the 90-minute debate. From there on, former Secretary of State Clinton played him like a violin.
In her opening statement, Clinton went on the attack against Trump's biggest strength, his much-vaunted wealth and alleged business sense that ironically has helped to make him a populist hero of the working-class and middle-class conservatives who make up his base.
Clinton attacked his image as a business genius and working-class hero by zeroing in on his borrowing $14 million from his father to start his real estate business.
"Donald was very fortunate in his life and that's all to his benefit," she said, emphasizing the words "very fortunate." Pointing out that "I have a different experience," Clinton described her own father's work as a drapery maker, a vignette that led up to her money line: Trump, she said, believes in "trumped up, trickle-down" economics.
The line didn't generate the laugh she might have hoped, but the night was still young.
Instead of defending his economic savvy, Trump tried to defend his life of obvious privilege. "My father gave me a very small loan in 1975 and I built it into a company that's worth many, many billions of dollars," Trump said. Indeed, but that was the first time that many of us have heard a multimillion-dollar IOU descried as "very small."
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