Clinton wins debate, Trump blames host
REPUBLICAN presidential nominee Donald Trump’s team scrambled on Tuesday to stem political damage from his first debate with Democrat Hillary Clinton, as he claimed unfair treatment and renewed his criticism of a Latina pageant contestant that Clinton had attacked him for.
Both global financial markets and everyday voters in polls said Clinton had carried the day in their early reviews of the showdown. Trump’s aides tried to spin the night as a win, even as a CNN poll showed that 62% of voters who watched said Clinton won the debate compared to 27% for Trump.
Risk appetite improved in the debate’s immediate aftermath, as traders judged that the possibility of a Trump presidency was receding, with the Mexican peso surging against the dollar, as havens from gold to Treasuries retreated.
The debate quickly got personal on the stage at Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York, on Monday, as Trump accused Clinton of staying home while he campaigned, and Clinton questioned Trump’s wealth, charitable giving and whether he paid any federal income tax.
Trump’s attacks ran out of steam as the night wore on, while Clinton saved some of her best lines for the end of the 90-minute session. She batted back Trump’s claim that she lacked the “stamina” to be president, and reminded viewers of some of Trump’s most critical words about women and minorities.
“She has become a US citizen,” Clinton said of a Latina beauty-pageant participant Trump once called “Miss Piggy” and “Miss Housekeeping”, and “you can bet she’s going to vote”.
Trump said that he could have made “nasty” comments about Clinton’s family, but that he chose not to.
He said afterwards that he “didn’t want to do my final attack” on former president Bill Clinton, “on what took place with respect to him and his life and all of the things that took place”, because the Clinton’s daughter, Chelsea, was in the room.
In a Fox News interview on Tuesday Trump acknowledged that Clinton might have got under his skin by mentioning the pageant contestant.
“She was the worst we ever had,” Trump said about the pageant contestant. “She was the winner and she gained a massive amount of weight, and we had a real problem.” The contestant also had a bad attitude, Trump said.
Similar comments about women by Trump have found their way into Clinton TV ads because of the major role female voters — especially suburban women — play in the election.
While there are some signs Clinton’s margin with women has eroded in the past few months, she continues to lead among them, getting 52% support to Trump’s 39% in a Bloomberg Politics poll of likely voters published on Monday. Her margin among suburban women is similar.
The pageant contestant, Alicia Machado, did not immediately respond to an e-mail seeking comment about her name coming up in the race.
Trump said he thought the debate “went really well” overall, but blamed moderator Lester Holt for “hostile questions” and said his own microphone was faulty. “It was on and off and it was much lower than hers,” Trump said. “I don’t want to believe in conspiracy theories, but it was much lower than hers and it was crackling.
“Debates are fine, but I think what’s most important is who is out there with people showing that they’re not hiding behind a podium or in a fundraiser with donors or wherever they may be on many days off,” Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway told reporters after the debate.
Conway said Trump had showed restraint in the final moment of the debate by not responding to his opponent’s “specious, gutter political attacks, partisan negative attacks about him and women” by criticising her husband while their daughter was present. “Restraint is a virtue, and restraint is certainly a presidential virtue,” Conway said.
She said Trump has momentum on his side and planned to return to a busy campaign schedule in the battleground states, starting with a Florida swing on Tuesday. Hillary Clinton is due to rally in North Carolina, while vicepresident Joe Biden and Bill Clinton do separate events for her in Pennsylvania and Ohio.
“Do you feel good tonight? Well, I sure do,” Clinton told supporters after the debate.
Colony Capital founder Tom Barrack, a Trump backer who spoke on his behalf at the Republican National Convention, lauded her performance. “She’s a superb debater: she was incredibly well prepared, she was composed, she didn’t get riled and she baited him beautifully,” Barrack said on Tuesday on Bloomberg TV.
Clinton has had years of political experience, while Trump was new to politics and he missed a lot of opportunities, Barrack said. But, he added, Trump turned in a performance that pleased his political base and few voters should be expected to move one way or another as a result of the debate.
On Capitol Hill, several House Republicans said Trump had let pitches go by, while speaker Paul Ryan said the nominee showed that for 90 minutes “he can go toe to toe” with Clinton.
Former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, one of Trump’s top advisers, said that if he were Trump, “I wouldn’t participate in another debate unless I was promised that the journalist would act like a journalist and not an incorrect, ignorant fact checker”, according to Politico. Trump had disputed Holt’s description of the policing tactic known as “stop and frisk” that Giuliani supports. A US district judge in 2013 ruled that the tactic unlawfully targeted minorities.
I don’t want to believe in conspiracy theories, but [my microphone] was … crackling