September 27, 2016 | No Comments
Donald Trump’s long night on Long Island morphed into a morning of finger-pointing Tuesday, as he revived his brashest personal to explain an erratic debate performance against Hillary Clinton.
The Republican presidential nominee, beleaguered after an erratic performance in Monday’s debate — with viewership as high as 100 million — retreated to his Fox News and Twitter cocoon. There, he took potshots at debate moderator Lester Holt and cited unscientific Internet surveys to prove he’d outperformed Hillary Clinton. And his advisers hinted that he might consider skipping the next showdown between the candidates, set for Oct. 9 in St. Louis.
It was a scarcely concealed defensive posture from the Trump camp, which found itself defending Trump against accusations of sexism (even as he redoubled his criticism of a former Miss Universe he had previously called “Miss Piggy,” saying on Tuesday she had gained “a massive amount of weight”). His surrogates, too, joined the pile-on against Holt, describing “hostile” questioning about his position on the Iraq War, his role in the birther controversy and his refusal to release his tax returns.
Trump spent his post-debate morning in the friendly confines of Fox, calling in to Fox & Friends for a gentle interview, where the hosts agreed he had been asked too many tough questions. Trump couched his concerns about Holt around mild praise of his performance as moderator, but his allies correctly pointed out that Holt reserved his most probing and personal questions for the businessman and spared Clinton similarly tough questions about her handling of classified information or her untrustworthy persona.
“You know, when you look at it, you watch the last four questions, he hit me on birther,” Trump said, “He hit me on a housing deal from many years ago that I settled with no recourse and no guilt. He asked me about that.”
But actually, it was Clinton who raised the 1973 housing discrimination lawsuit against Trump’s company. She also grilled him about paying no income tax over the years. Trump’s “That makes me smart” reply has Democrats salivating.
Equally remarkable were the subjects Trump decided to skip in Monday’s debate. He made no mention of Clinton’s handling of the attack on an American compound in Benghazi. He scarcely alluded to his aggressive seal-the-borders stance on immigration, despite making it the hallmark of his campaign. Trump didn’t mention controversies about Clinton Foundation or her ties to Wall Street. (Clinton actually got in the only Wall Street-based attack, suggesting Trump was hundreds of millions of dollars in debt to big banks.)
Trump skipped any mention of Clinton’s decision to label some of his supporters “deplorable.” And even as she skewered him for misleading about his position on the war in Iraq, he made only a passing mention of the fact that Clinton voted to go to war in the first place.
“Well, he didn’t ask her about the emails at all. He didn’t ask her about her scandals. He didn’t ask her about the Benghazi deal that she destroyed,” he said on Tuesday morning. “He didn’t ask her about a lot of things she should have been asked about. I mean, you know, there’s no question about it. He didn’t ask about her foundation.”
Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, a top Trump surrogate, accused Holt of pulling a “Candy Crowley,” referencing her infamous Mitt Romney fact-check in 2012.
“I’m not gonna allow him to play lawyer and contradict our candidate,” he said on “Fox and Friends.” “And I’d like to know: When did a moderator become a fact-checker? And if you’re gonna be a fact-checker, you better darn be right.”
Most pundits agreed Trump’s strongest part of the debate was the first 20 to 30 minutes, when he parried Clinton’s barbs and painted her as a typical politician – the kind he certainly is not. In a discussion of the country’s international trade deals, Trump thrashed Clinton as taking a politically motivated tack.
“In all fairness to Secretary Clinton, when she started talking about this, it was really very recently,” he said. “She’s been doing this for 30 years. And why hasn’t she made the agreements better? The NAFTA agreement is defective … Secretary Clinton and others, politicians, should have been doing this for years, not right now, because of the fact that we’ve created a movement.”
Trump said he’d tax companies who send jobs and plants to other countries and sell their products back to the United States.
“What you do is you say, fine, you want to go to Mexico or some other country, good luck. We wish you a lot of luck,” he said. “But if you think you’re going to make your air conditioners or your cars or your cookies or whatever you make and bring them into our country without a tax, you’re wrong.”
Trump’s camp is already hinting he’s considering taking a pass on the next debate. Giuliani told reporters Monday night that he’d advise Trump to drop out of the next meeting because the moderators wouldn’t be fair.
Clinton and her allies, on the other hand, are blanketing the airwaves. Priorities USA immediately launched an ad blasting Trump’s temperament. The Clinton campaign issued its own blistering video: an interview with Alicia Machado, the former Miss Universe winner who said Trump demeaned her when she gained weight.
In addition, Clinton, her running mate Tim Kaine and her husband, former President Bill Clinton will be on the trail for her, hoping to capture some momentum from the debate. Post-debate polling showed viewers largely found Clinton superior to Trump, though it’s unclear whether the debate will lead to movement in the swing-state polls, which have shown the two candidates in a dead heat.
Trump, meanwhile, will get back to where he’s most comfortable — holding a rally on Tuesday night.
Louis Nelson and Nolan D. McCaskill contributed to this report.