What the final debate tells us
LETHAL DARTS: Trump is malleable while Clinton is coherent
HOW Donald Trump vs Hillary Clinton looks to Times Opinion writers — before, during and after their meeting in Las Vegas on Wednesday.
EGGED ON TO GET EGG ON HIS FACE When Melania Trump stood by her man-child the other night on CNN over the lewd comments to Billy Bush on a hot mic, she told Anderson Cooper that her husband “was led on — like, egged on — from the host to say dirty and bad stuff ”.
She was offering her best defence. But it was actually the best damnation.
At the final debate in Las Vegas on Wednesday, Trump once more showed how easily egged on he is.
Continuing to deploy lethal darts from her team of shrinks, Clinton baited Trump into a series of damaging nails-in-the-coffin statements. And, it was so easy. The onetime litigator prosecuted the case against Trump, sparking another temperamental spiral, as effectively as Chris Christie once broke down Marco Rubio.
In Trump’s warped fun-house mirror of a psyche, every rejection is a small death. That is why he harps on humiliation, that America is being humiliated on the world stage, that we are losing potency — a theme that resonates with angry voters, who feel humiliated by their dwindling economic fortunes, and angry about illegal immigrants and refugees swarming in who might be competition.
She once more proved adept at getting her rival’s goat: she again contended that he’s not a self-made man, but a spoiled rich kid who was underwritten by his father, and she accused him of choking on bringing up the issue of who would pay for the wall when he met the president of Mexico.
Trump tried to stay calm, but he can never let go of a slight.
He defended himself on groping charges by saying, “nobody has more respect for women than I do”. But he ended up, after Clinton’s hazing — “Donald thinks belittling women makes him bigger” — blurting out “such a nasty woman”, as Clinton talked about entitlements.
No doubt it is hard for a man — whose lovely, sphinx-like wife rarely talks at dinners with friends to make room for more talking by Trump — to listen to an opinionated woman speak dismissively to him over 90 minutes.
When Clinton called Trump a Putin puppet, he unravelled, once more proving how malleable he is with anyone from the Russian president to Clinton, who either praises him or pokes him.
“No puppet. No puppet. You’re the puppet,” he said, going into what President Barack Obama’s former chief speechwriter, Jon Favreau, tweeted was “a full Baldwin”. Talking about Putin, Trump once more offered the simple reason he has flipped his party’s wary stance towards the Evil Empire, subjugating his party’s ideology to his own ego: “He said nice things about me.”
He was so unnerved, he said one of the most shocking things ever heard in a debate, putting his ego ahead of American democracy. Asked by the admirable debate moderator, Fox News’s Chris Wallace, if he would accept the results of the election or reject it as rigged, Trump replied coyly and self-destructively: “I will tell you at the time,” adding, “I will keep you in suspense.”
The inanity continued, naturally, when Trump spinners talked to the press after the debate.
As The Washington Post’s Robert Costa tweeted, Sarah Palin told reporters that Trump will accept only a “legitimate” election, and anything else would betray those who “died” for freedom.
And the Post’s Phil Rucker tweeted that “Giuliani just predicted Dems will ‘steal’ the election in Pennsylvania by busing in people from out of state to pose as dead people to cast ballots”.
Trump tried to give what one of his biographers, Timothy O’Brien, calls his “Clint Eastwood ‘High Plains Drifter’ glare” and spaghetti Western talk: “We have some bad hombres here that we’re gonna get ’em out,” he said about illegal immigrants who commit crimes.
But he was all hat, no cattle. He gets so easily distracted by belittling statements — even though he dishes them out so easily — that he could not focus to make points in areas where Clinton is vulnerable.
To stop losing, he would have to stop losing it.
But he didn’t. He got egged on. Bigly. — Maureen Dowd, a Times columnist
TRUMP’S NASTY HABITS
Trump dismissed Clinton with all the anger and contempt of a man who has repeatedly been called out for how he treats women. “Such a nasty woman,” he said.
That cutting dismissal, as well as his taunt that her husband didn’t agree with her, played to the heart of the gender dynamics of this election. A man hypersensitive to criticism of any kind was under constant challenge from a confident, assertive woman. Trump’s advisers, knowing that he had to win over women, particularly the suburban women who have voted Republican in the past, have tried coaching him to keep his cool. His daughter, Ivanka, tried putting forward a childcare plan. But Clinton got under his thin skin, and it showed.
In the first debate, he started off with elaborate courtesy. “Secretary Clinton,” he said, calling attention to how he was using the title, even as Clinton called him “Donald”. But, he couldn’t stop himself from interrupting her, reminding women of how often men have talked over them at work or at home.
When the Clinton campaign deployed Alicia Machado, the former Miss Universe, in a campaign ad talking about how he had shamed her for gaining weight, he doubled down, reminding women of how vulnerable they are to the male gaze.
The second debate, surely one of the most surreal on record, was consumed by the fallout over Trump’s boasts that his fame entitled him to force himself on women.
His denials during that debate prompted woman after woman to come forward recounting how he groped them, claims he dismissed as lies.
Trump paraded women who say
Continued next page
No doubt it is hard for a man — whose lovely, sphinx-like wife rarely talks at dinners with friends to make room for more talking by Trump — to listen to an opinionated woman speak dismissively to him over 90 minutes.