Trump Lost the Battle Against Himself
The rest of the debate could best be titled "Blown Opportunities." At one point, for example, Clinton went after Trump's refusal to reveal his tax returns, the first major presidential candidate to do so. Trump came back with a good line, by schoolyard argument standards, by saying, "I will release my tax returns, against my lawyer's wishes, when she releases her 33,000 emails that have been deleted."
"Well, I think you've seen another example of bait-and-switch here," said Clinton with a smile. She smiled a lot during the evening. She had good reasons for it besides the advice given to her by friend and foe alike to smile more.
Instead of staying on the attack, Trump became defensive as Clinton recalled how he revealed while acquiring a casino license that he had not paid any income taxes. Trump's response, "That makes me smart," might impress his core supporters but probably won't do much to expand his base.
Similarly, his bait-and-switch tactics failed to deflect Holt's question as to what took Trump so long to acknowledge that President Obama was born in the United States, contrary to Trump's long-held doubts about the president's Hawaiian birth certificate.
"I was the one that got him to produce the birth certificate," Trump boasted, "and I think I did a good job." But, as Holt noted, the president released his long-form birth certificate in 2011. Trump continued to question its authenticity until 2015. Now Trump said he wants to move on and "get back to fighting ISIS." Fine -- but not before Hillary pilloried the inherent racism in Trump's crusade.
Trump bragged about how he wasn't spending a lot of time preparing for the debate. He didn't want to get in the way of his naturally charismatic self. The result turned out to be hyper Trump, whose insistence that his temperament was more presidential than Clinton's brought the biggest laughs of the evening.
"Just listen to what you heard," she asked the audience during the strange back-and-forth over Trump's birtherism. That's the sound of a woman who does not want to get in the way of a man who is destroying himself.
========
(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@tribune.com.)
(c) 2016 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.
