September 27, 2016 | No Comments
It was a sober night Monday for those whose debate drinking games counted on the candidates throwing around campaign buzzwords like Benghazi, the border wall and the Clinton Foundation.
While those issues dominated various phases of the 2016 run for the White House, none were uttered during the first presidential debate.
Hillary Clinton may have been so surprised by the lack of mention of the Benghazi attacks that she felt emboldened to actually allude to the tragic episode herself, arguing late in the debate that her ability to endure 11 hours of questioning from the House Benghazi Committee disproved Donald Trump’s claim that she lacked the “stamina” to be president.
Moments after the debate, Trump grumbled on Twitter about topics he thought moderator and NBC anchor Lester Holt should have raised, but didn’t.
“Nothing on emails. Nothing on the corrupt Clinton Foundation. And nothing on #Benghazi,” Trump wrote, in a tweet that did not mention Holt by name.
Many commentators and some Trump supporters noted that Trump did nothing to raise allegations of improprieties involving Clinton Foundation fundraising or what the GOP has alleged is Clinton’s failure to make sure the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi had adequate security at the time four Americans were killed there in 2012.
Trump did bring up the ubiquitous email issue himself, saying he’d release his tax returns when she released 33,000 emails she deleted before turning a roughly equal number over to the State Department in 2014. Clinton says she no longer has those messages, but she never directly answered Trump’s question about why they were deleted nor did she respond when Holt briefly followed up on the point.
Trump also failed to mention Clinton’s claim that about half of his supporters were “deplorables”—a statement she has withdrawn and apologized for.
While Trump lamented that Clinton’s vulnerabilities didn’t receive much attention in the debate, some of Democrats’ hobby horses about Trump also got brushed aside.
Allegations that the Trump University real estate seminar program was a fraud that bilked participants of up to $35,000 apiece have been fodder for campaign ads and lawsuits and even led to Trump’s startling claim that a Latino judge should be removed from the case because of his heritage.
But there was no mention at all of Trump U. Monday night, nor of the controversy over the Trump Foundation’s illegal donation to a Florida political group or the foundation’s unusual affinity for purchasing oversized portraits of its namesake.
Some of the world’s most urgent crises, like the ongoing violence in Syria estimated to have killed more than 400,000 people, got no discussion at all from the debate stage in Long Island. It could be that such subjects will get more focus at the second presidential debate, set for Oct. 9 and expected to focus on global affairs.
Holt had announced three topics for Monday night’s debate—America’s Direction, Achieving Prosperity and Securing America—so one might have expected the latter to lead to a substantial discussion of immigration policy and the vetting of refugees, but those issues got only glancing treatment.
The NBC News anchor never raised the immigration issue, but Trump brought it up a couple of times. He noted, in garbled language, that he’d been endorsed by a union representing immigration and customs agents. Trump also made a somewhat confusing reference to a recent Department of Homeland Security inspector general report that found hundreds of instances where immigrants were naturalized without complete fingerprint checks that would have shown them to have been previously ordered deported.
“We were deporting 800 people….These people we were going to deport ended up becoming citizens…..Now it turns out it might be 1,500 and they don’t even know,” Trump said.
If foreign policy was to be left for another night, major domestic policy issues should have had a good chance Monday. But another favorite punching bag for Republicans—President Obama’s health care law—escaped entirely unscathed.
Some of the issues that Holt didn’t ask about, like climate change or Obamacare, may have been on his question list. But he seemed to ask relatively few questions, allowing prolonged exchanges by the candidates and indulging Trump’s requests for rebuttal time.
The issue of health care was almost completely bypassed, with the candidates making only the briefest references to it.
Clinton added “health” to the list of things Trump wasn’t supporting if he didn’t pay federal income taxes in recent years. Trump said one reason the U.S. doesn’t have “new hospitals” is because the country has “squandered” money on many of Clinton’s “ideas.”
Another touch area the candidates didn’t delve into Monday: Clinton’s health. Trump did say he thought she lacked the “stamina” to be president, but he didn’t elaborate and he never referenced her recent bout with pneumonia or the video of her appearing to collapse after an outdoor Sept. 11 commemoration ceremony in New York.
While the debate tiptoed around the health issue, many Twitter commentators didn’t. They noted that Trump seemed to be under the weather, sniffling occasionally and sounding a bit nasal. Perhaps Trump passed up the health-related hit on Clinton because he feared she might have a tart reply suggesting he was being worn down by life on the campaign trail.