Jabs by Clinton, Trump go personal
They clash on stamina, race, taxes, ISIS, foreign policy
HEMPSTEAD, N.Y. — Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton clashed in unusually personal terms during a first general-election presidential debate Monday evening, with Clinton accusing Trump of pushing “racist lies” about President Barack Obama’s birthplace and Trump accusing Clinton of lacking the “stamina” to be president.
“She doesn’t have the look. She doesn’t have the stamina. I said she doesn’t have the stamina. I don’t believe she does have the stamina,” Trump said, when the moderator, Lester Holt of NBC News, asked him about a past comment that Clinton lacked a presidential “look.”
“You have to be able to negotiate our trade deals. … I don’t believe that Hillary has the stamina,” Trump, the GOP nominee, said.
Clinton responded that she had traveled to 112 countries as secretary of state and negotiated trade deals and other agreements. If Trump did that, she said, “he can talk to me about stamina.”
Trump responded that although Clinton has experience, “it’s bad experience.”
Trump had earlier accused Clinton of going along with Obama’s foreign policy — criticizing her, in particular, for the nuclear deal with Iran, which he said had empowered Iran to become a major power and U.S. adversary.
“We lose on everything,” Trump said, striking a theme that he hit a number of times on subjects ranging from trade to debt to cyberattacks to military rivalries.
Trump answered the first economics-focused questions of the debate by saying that the U.S. was being hoodwinked and taken advantage of by Mexico, China and other countries. He talked about manufacturing jobs leaving the U.S., and promised — as he had in the primary — to impose penalties on companies that take jobs offshore.
“Our country’s in very
deep trouble. We don’t know what we’re doing,” Trump said. Of countries like China, he said, “What they’re doing to us is a very, very sad thing.”
Clinton began her first answers with an appeal to common purpose, talking about her 2-year-old granddaughter. But she quickly turned to attacks on Trump, saying that he had rooted for the housing-market collapse a little less than a decade ago — “That’s called business, by the way,” Trump interjected — and saying that Trump would raise the debt by offering huge tax cuts to high earners.
“I call it Trumped-up trickle down, because that’s what it would be,” Clinton said, referring back to the trickle-down economics model of the 1980s.
The two sparred over international trade — primarily with Trump accusing Clinton of backing away from her support for trade deals for political gain.
“Secretary Clinton and others, politicians, should have been doing this for years,” Trump said, contending she and Obama have done little or nothing to stop jobs from flowing overseas.
Disputing his version of events, she said, “I know you live in your reality.”
Later, Clinton accused Trump of pushing a “racist lie” that Obama was not born in the United States.
“It can’t be dismissed that easily. He has really started his political activity based on this racist lie that our first black president was not an American citizen. There was no — absolutely no — evidence for it. But he persisted, he persisted year after year,” Clinton said.
She cited 1970s lawsuits in which Trump was accused of discriminating against black tenants: “He has a long record of engaging in racist behavior.”
Trump claimed credit for pushing the notion that Obama was not born in the United States, saying that “I think I did a good job.”
“Nobody was pressing it, nobody was caring much about it,” Trump said when Holt asked why he had continued to support the “birther” theory, even after Obama had released his birth certificate from Hawaii. “But I was the one who got him to produce the birth certificate, and I think I did a good job.”
‘IT’S NOT NICE’
Throughout the debate, Trump repeatedly interrupted both Clinton and Holt, and accused both of misrepresenting his past statements. Trump brought a flavor of the rowdy Republican primary into the normally staid world of late-fall debates, with asides, eye-rolls and complaints about the way he had been treated by Clinton, onstage and off.
“It’s not nice,” Trump said at one point, referring to Clinton’s TV advertising against him. “And I don’t deserve that.”
Clinton seemed thrown off-guard at several moments, at one point letting out a “Whoo!” after a Trump attack on her temperament.
Trump and Clinton accused each other of not possessing the proper temperament to be president, with Trump saying Clinton is not strong enough, and Clinton saying Trump is too easily taunted.
Clinton criticized Trump during the first presidential debate of the general election campaign for saying that U.S. Navy ships should open fire on Iranian boats that had taunted them in the Persian Gulf.
She reused a familiar line from earlier in the campaign: “His cavalier attitude about nuclear weapons is so deeply troubling. … A man who can be provoked by a tweet should not have their finger anywhere near the nuclear codes.”
“That one’s getting a little bit old,” Trump said.
“It’s a good one,” Clinton responded.
The two candidates later sparred about who was responsible for the rise of the Islamic State. Trump blamed Obama, saying that the U.S. had withdrawn too many troops, too quickly, and had failed to “take the oil” out from under Islamic State strongholds in Iraq and Syria.
“Now they have the oil all over the place,” Trump said, including those territories, as well as the Islamic State affiliates in Libya.
At one point, Trump attacked Clinton for posting her plan to fight the Islamic State on her website. That, he said, was not something that Gen. Douglas MacArthur — a leader of American forces in World War II and the Korean War — would have done.
“Well, at least I have a plan to fight ISIS,” Clinton said.
“You’re telling the enemy everything you want to do,” Trump said, adding, “You have been fighting ISIS your entire adult life.”
But the Islamic State has not existed for the bulk of Clinton’s adult life.
LAW AND ORDER
Trump asserted that blacks and Hispanics in U.S. cities are “living in hell” because the cities are so violent. He said he would restore “law and order,” in part by using the aggressive stop-and-frisk enforcement tactics once employed by the New York city police.
“Secretary Clinton doesn’t want to use a couple of words, and that’s law and order. We need law and order. If we don’t have it, we’re not going to have a country,” Trump said. “We need law and order in our country.”
Holt told Trump that stop-and-frisk tactics had been ruled unconstitutional because they disproportionately targeted blacks and Hispanics.
“No, you’re wrong,” Trump said, blaming a judge who was biased against police, and blaming a New York City administration for giving up on the case. “The argument is that we have to take the guns away from these people. … These are people that are bad people.”
Trump declined again to release his income-tax returns, offering two explanations — first, that his returns were under audit, and second, that the returns would not be that revelatory anyway.
“You don’t learn that much from tax returns, that I can tell you,” the GOP nominee said, after Holt had questioned the first rationale, saying that the IRS would not prohibit the release of tax returns under audit.
That exchange came during a period in which Clinton sharply criticized Trump over his taxes, suggesting that perhaps Trump had not paid any income taxes in recent years.
“That means zero for troops, zero for vets, zero for schools and health,” Clinton said.
Trump did not seem to push back against that suggestion. At one point, when Clinton suggested that Trump should have paid more taxes to improve the country’s infrastructure.
“It would be squandered too, believe me,” Trump said.
Trump frequently talked over Clinton’s responses. Later, Clinton said she felt that Trump had blamed her for things beyond her control. “Why not?” Trump said. Clinton, who was said to have prepared to deal with an unpredictable opponent, still seemed caught off guard: “Just join the debate by saying more crazy things.”
NATO AND RUSSIA
Trump later criticized the NATO military alliance, repeating a charge that the U.S. allies in that alliance were not paying enough for the defense that the U.S. provides.
“The 28 countries in NATO, many of them aren’t paying their fair share. And that bothers me,” Trump said. When he made similar comments, weeks earlier, Trump was criticized for undermining the West’s primary military alliance.
Trump also got into a brief argument with Holt about the Iraq war, which Holt said Trump supported just before it began.
“I did not support the war in Iraq. That is a mainstream
media nonsense,” Trump said. “Wait a minute. I was against the war in Iraq. Just so you put it out.”
“The record does not show that,” Holt said.
“The record shows that I’m right,” Trump said. He downplayed a 2002 interview with radio host Howard Stern, in which Trump said he supported the war before it began. “I said, very lightly, ‘I don’t know, maybe, who knows?’”
At another point, the debate discussion shifted to the cyberattacks on the Democratic National Committee, which revealed internal emails embarrassing to Clinton and her supporters.
Clinton’s campaign, citing the opinions of cybersecurity experts, has blamed Russia for the attack.
“I don’t think anybody knows it was Russia that broke into the DNC. She says Russia, Russia, Russia,” Trump said. “It could also be somebody sitting on their bed, that weighs 400 pounds.”
Trump has been accused of being too friendly with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
FACT-CHECKING FLAP
A roiling disagreement over the role of the debate moderator flared up ahead of the face-off, with Democrats arguing that a more activist fact-checker role was needed to rein in Trump’s pattern of factual misstatements.
But Janet Brown, the executive director of the Commission on Presidential Debates, seemed to side with the Republican nominee, saying in a television interview that “it’s not a good idea to get the moderator into essentially serving as the Encyclopaedia Britannica.”
She added, however, that ultimately it was up to Holt to do the job as he sees fit.
“She has a challenge because Donald Trump inveterately says things that aren’t true,” Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, said on NBC’s Meet the Press.
“She’s got to be able to make that positive case but also not let Donald Trump get away with what he’s likely to do, which is to make stuff up.”
Trump’s team, however, continued to press its case Sunday that fact-checking shouldn’t be the responsibility of the moderator.
“I really don’t appreciate campaigns thinking it is the job of the media to go and be these virtual fact-checkers and that these debate moderators should somehow do their bidding,” Conway said on ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos.
She also disputed the notion that Trump makes more frequent misstatements, saying Clinton’s “casual relationship with the truth is well-known to Americans.”