Matt Walsh:
For the first 30 minutes, Trump was great. In fact I was legitimately impressed. He put Hillary on the defensive and she responded by cackling and stammering and flashing an evil grin like Nurse Ratched from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Hillary is absolutely awful when you take her off her script. She knows how to do what she practiced, but she doesn’t know how to respond like a regular human person when she’s backed into a corner.
Unfortunately, the debate was not 30 minutes. It was 90 minutes. And those last 60 were a disaster for Trump. Period. And if you want him to win, you need to criticize him now and stop pretending everything he touches is gold. Or he will lose. Badly. That’s the situation. Time to deal with it.
Trump let Hillary get away with virtually every lie she told. She shrugged off her email scandal by calling it a mistake and Trump did not follow up. Later she spoke about the need for cyber security and Trump didn’t even bother bringing up that Clinton kept an unsecure server in her freaking bathroom.
Trump was put on the defensive on a number of issues and he didn’t handle the situation well. He rambled and babbled and allowed the discussion to stay on his own scandals and controversies rather than pivoting to Hillary.
Hillary blatantly called Trump a racist — THREE TIMES — and Trump had no retort, except to tell some strange story about how he hired some minorities once or something and it made him feel good. I don’t know. I could follow.
The subject turned to policing and racial issues and Trump never brought up the fact that Hillary has pandered to the mob and endangered police lives. Hillary also put the mother of an attempted cop killer on stage at her convention, but of course Trump made no mention of that.
Trump basically allowed Hillary to get away with everything, and only tried to hold her feet to the fire at the end for producing “not nice” ads about him. That’s what he got her on. Not Benghazi, not the emails, not speaking fees or anything else. Only that she was “not nice” in some ads.
He did briefly bring up the DNC’s railroading of Bernie Sanders but then stepped on his own point by transitioning that into a conversation about how his son likes to play computer games.
I will give him credit for one good line. When Hillary attacked Trump for stiffing some contractors who worked on one of his hotels, Trump shot back: “Yeah well Ambassador Stevens was your employee and he’s dead now.”
Just kidding. Trump didn’t say that. He just rambled for another 12 minutes while Hillary silently gave praise to Satan.
It was unbearable to witness, especially because I could see the glee seeping out of Clinton’s face. She can’t believe her luck. She’s a corrupt, lying, half-humanoid crook with a lifetime of scandal to her name, and the Republican nominee had little interest in talking about any of that tonight. Instead he spent 60 minutes defending his casinos and explaining why he should be given credit for making Obama release his birth certificate.