Trump vs. Clinton: Round One
The first of three 2016 presidential debates took place on Monday, September 26 at Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York. NBC News anchor Lester Holt moderated the first presidential debate between Republican nominee Donald Trump and Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.
The debate was controversial before it even began. Trump complained about the debate schedule back in July. He said in a tweet that the Democrats were “trying to rig the debates” by putting two at the same time as NFL games. In an ABC News interview, he claimed that the NFL sent him a letter that conveyed how “ridiculous” this was. However, an NFL spokesman said in a statement: “While we’d obviously wish the debate commission could find another night, we did not send a letter to Trump.” Trump also accused the debates of being “phony” and “unfair” because the moderator, Lester Holt of NBC, is a Democrat. According to Holt’s voter registration, he has been a registered Republican in New York State since 2003. Clinton’s communications director, Jennifer Palmieri, also expressed concern of bias in the debates. She suggested that journalists “lower the bar of their questions to suit the candidate in front of them” and ask Trump easier questions since “he has not put forward detailed material which you can … question him on.”
Others have claimed that debates are unfair for a different reason: excluded candidates. The Commission of Presidential Debates requires a presidential candidate to poll at 15 percent or higher to take part. Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson averaged at 8.4 percent and Green Party candidate Jill Stein at 3.2 percent. Johnson said in a statement: “The CPD may scoff at a ticket that enjoys ‘only’ nine or ten percent in their hand-selected polls, but even nine percent represents 13 million voters … Yet, the Republicans and Democrats are choosing to silence the candidate preferred by those millions of Americans.” Jill Stein promised to arrive at the debate stage as an act of civil disobedience, even if doing so resulted in her arrest. She was at the university the day of the debate doing press interviews, but she did not have the proper credentials to be there. She was “nicely escorted off campus” as a Nassau County Police Department spokeswoman put it.
The weekend before the debate saw, arguably, the most personal controversy yet. Mark Cuban, a vocal criticizer of Trump and fellow reality show billionaire, tweeted that he would be in the front row at the debate to watch Clinton win. On Saturday, Trump threatened on twitter that if Clinton invited Mark Cuban as a guest, he “will put Gennifer Flowers right alongside of him!” Flowers, who had an affair with Bill Clinton in the 1970s, told the New York Times in a text that she would be there. However, Indiana Governor Mike Pence, Trump’s vice presidential nominee, talked to Chris Wallace, host of “Fox News Sunday.” He insisted Trump’s threat of inviting Flowers was not serious. It was meant to ridicule the Clinton campaign’s supposed avoidance of substantial issues. The debate itself was 90 straight minutes of policy, attacks, and quite a few interruptions. The three topics were “Achieving Prosperity,” “America’s Direction,” and “Securing America.”
Under the topic “Achieving Prosperity,” the first question the candidates received was on job creation. Clinton answered first with a plan that includes “building an economy that works for everyone,” “making the economy fairer,” encouraging profit-sharing, and providing “more support for those struggling to balance family and work.” She reiterated her support for paid family leave and equal pay for women.
Asked the same question, Trump asserted that that America must protect its economy from other countries that are “using our country as a piggy bank.” The United States is being “ripped off by every single country in the world,” according to him. He discussed his plan of reducing taxes, which Clinton called the “most extreme version” of trickle-down economics, only helping the very rich, such as Trump.
Clinton stated that analysts show that her plan will add 10 million jobs, while her opponent’s plan will lose 3.5 million jobs and increase the debt by 5 trillion. Clinton declared, “I think it's time that the wealthy and corporations paid their fair share to support this country.” Trump countered that she will “regulate businesses out of existence.” Clinton also wants to create jobs by investing in clean energy, stating that Trump rejected climate change as a Chinese hoax. He denied this, but he did state in 2012, “The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.” On the flip-side, Clinton tried to distance herself from her support of NAFTA, though she did call it the “gold standard” as Trump claimed.
Clinton mentioned her father, a blue-collar drapery-maker, and her middle-class upbringing several times to affirm her commitment to the middle-class. She said, “You know, Donald was very fortunate in his life … I have a very different experience. My father was a small-businessman. He worked really hard.” She also mentioned her father in telling Trump that she has “met a lot of people who’ve been stiffed by your businesses” and is “certainly relieved that my late middle-class father never did business with you.”
Some of the more questionable quotes from this section included Hillary Clinton accusing Trump of rooting for the housing crises so he could make money. His response was “That’s called business, by the way.” Trump blamed Clinton for a lack of leadership. She answered, “I have a feeling that by, the end of this evening, I'm going to be blamed for everything that's ever happened,” to which he asked, “Why not?” Trump also stated that not paying federal income taxes “makes me smart.”
In “Achieving Direction,” the candidates were asked about race relations and how they would bridge the gap.
“Unfortunately, race still determines too much,” Clinton said. It “often determines where people live, determines what kind of education in their public schools they can get, and, yes, it determines how they're treated in the criminal justice system.” She discussed her plan to help inner cities by restoring trust with police and dealing with gun violence. The “systemic racism in our criminal justice system,” she maintains, leads it to “put people away for too long, for too little.” Clinton was asked if police had implicit bias. She responded, “I think implicit bias is a problem for everyone, not just police. I think, unfortunately, too many of us in our great country jump to conclusions about each other.” In police, she added, bias can have “literally fatal consequences.”
Trump, on the other hand, insisted that “we need law and order.” He advocated for stop and frisk, which Lester Holt pointed out, was ruled unconstitutional. He referenced the violence in Chicago multiple times. He discussed some of the inner cities he had been to while Clinton “decided to stay home.” She countered, “I think Donald just criticized me for preparing for this debate. And, yes, I did. And you know what else I prepared for? I prepared to be president. And I think that's a good thing.”
Holt asked Trump why he continued to spread the belief that President Obama was not a natural born citizen. Trump asserted that he is “satisfied” with the birth certificate President Obama released and wants to move on to combating terrorism, creating jobs, and securing the boarders. He explained his questioning of the president’s citizenship as recently as January when the birth certificate was released in 2011 by responding that “nobody was caring much about it.” He added that in regards to President Obama, Clinton “treated him with terrible disrespect” when she debated against him in 2008.
As they moved on to “Securing America,” both candidates were first asked about cyber security. Clinton stressed the need to combat independent groups and nations, such as the Russian hack on the Democratic National Convention. Trump replied, “I don't think anybody knows it was Russia that broke into the DNC … it could be Russia, but it could also be China. It could also be lots of other people. It also could be somebody sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds.”
The topic moved to online efforts and air strikes to combat terrorism. Clinton insisted that we must “support our Arab and Kurdish partners” in the effort to defeat ISIS. She hoped that within the year, the military would force ISIS out of Iraq and restrict them to Syria.
Trump blamed President Obama and Secretary Clinton for the situation and said that in pulling troops from Iraq, they “created a vacuum” for ISIS to form. Earlier in the program, he had claimed that Clinton has “been fighting ISIS [her] entire adult life.” ISIS was created in April 2013 when the Islamic State of Iraq absorbed Jabhat al-Nursa, an al Qaeda-backed Syrian militant group, and became the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIS). Clinton, born in 1947, was 66 years old.
Some of Trump’s biggest hurdles are the public’s concerns about his judgement and temperament. He claimed, “I have much better judgement than she does,” and “my strongest asset is my temperament.” Clinton disagreed, saying, “his cavalier attitude about nuclear weapons is so deeply troubling” and “a man who can be provoked by a tweet should not have his fingers anywhere near the nuclear codes.”
Trump floundered in the last few questions. He was asked about his quote that Clinton lacks “a presidential look.” He attempted to turn the focus to stamina, to which Clinton replied, “Well, as soon as he travels to 112 countries and negotiates a peace deal, a cease-fire, a release of dissidents, an opening of new opportunities in nations around the world, or even spends 11 hours testifying in front of a congressional committee, he can talk to me about stamina.” She then used his original quote, which she declared was about appearance, to bring up some of his controversial remarks about women, lack of support for equal pay, and calling a Latina beauty contestant “Miss Housekeeping.” Trump then said of her advertisements attacking him, “It’s not nice. I don’t deserve that.”
The debate ended with both agreeing to support the outcome of the election.
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