Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump Press Pointed Attacks in Debate

[Kєvin.™▲]

In a relentlessly antagonistic debate, Donald J. Trump and Hillary Clinton clashed over trade, the Iraq war, his refusal to release his tax returns and her use of a private email server, with Mr. Trump frequently showing impatience and political inexperience as Mrs. Clinton pushed him to defend his past denigration of women and President Obama.

Mr. Trump repeatedly interrupted Mrs. Clinton and at times talked over her throughout the 90-minute debate, making slashing attacks that surely pleased his Republican base but may have been off-putting to women and undecided voters. He also left unchallenged her assertion that he paid no federal taxes for years.

For her part, Mrs. Clinton repeatedly chided Mr. Trump for bungling his facts while accusing him of hiding information about his debts to Wall Street and foreign banks.

Mr. Trump’s strongest moments came early in the evening, when he put Mrs. Clinton on the defensive over her support for free trade agreements that he argues have cost Americans jobs.

But on issues of race and gender, Mr. Trump was less sure-footed. When he was pressed about what he would say to people offended by his years of questions about whether Mr. Obama was born in the United States, Mr. Trump did not respond directly, instead claiming credit for Mr. Obama’s releasing his birth certificate.

 

 

illary Clinton on Monday night. Frank Luntz, a Republican pollster, wrote on Twitter that Mrs. Clinton “has had the best debate training I’ve seen in years.” Credit Doug Mills/The New York Times
“I say nothing because I was able to get him to produce it,” he said of the birth certificate.

Mrs. Clinton also tried to drive a wedge between Mr. Trump and the president, whose approval ratings are on the rise. “Barack Obama is a man of great dignity, and I could tell how much it bothered him,” she said of the controversy, in a clear appeal to voters who deeply admire Mr. Obama but are less enthusiastic about her.

She also broadened the issue beyond so-called birtherism, which she called a “racist lie,” and accused Mr. Trump of having “a long record of engaging in racist behavior.” She singled out his family’s real estate company for being sued by the Justice Department in 1973 for racial discrimination.

Mr. Trump did little to rebut her charges of racism. He instead said that he had recently watched some of her debates with Mr. Obama in the 2008 Democratic primary and that she had been quite harsh on her then-rival. “You treated him with terrible disrespect,” he said. But Mr. Trump himself repeatedly demeaned Mr. Obama in the debate, at one point telling Mrs. Clinton that he was “your president” and, at another, mocking Mr. Obama over his penchant for golf.

Later, Mrs. Clinton recalled Mr. Trump’s stream of insults to women over the years, a determined effort by her to rally female voters to her side.

“This is a man who has called women pigs, slobs and dogs, and someone who has said pregnancy is an inconvenience to employers, who has said women don’t deserve equal pay unless they do as good a job as men,” Mrs. Clinton said. Referring to a beauty pageant contestant, she continued: “He called this woman Miss Piggy. Then he called her Miss Housekeeping, because she was Latina. Donald, she has a name.”

Mr. Trump did not have a forceful rejoinder, saying that most of his insults had been aimed at the comedian Rosie O’Donnell, with whom he had feuded. “I said very tough things to her, and I think everybody would agree that she deserves it, and nobody feels sorry for her,” he said.

But Mr. Trump said mysteriously that he had “something extremely rough” to say about “Hillary and her family,” then added, “I can’t do it, I can’t do it.” He told CNN afterward that he was proud of “holding back” on Bill Clinton and his extramarital affairs because the Clintons’ daughter, Chelsea, was in the audience.

The debate took on a surreal quality at times, with more discussion of insults like “slobs” than immigration or the Affordable Care Act. Mrs. Clinton came off as a classically prepared debater who used Mr. Trump’s record and words against him at 19 separate moments, while Mr. Trump seemed to be improvising on stage much of the time. And Mr. Trump was stunningly personal in his attacks, such as questioning Mrs. Clinton’s stamina.

She fired back: “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.”

Mr. Trump also targeted Mrs. Clinton for not taking a sufficiently hard line on crime, chastising her for refusing to say “law and order.”

Blacks and Hispanics, he said, “are living in hell because it’s so dangerous.”

He attacked Mrs. Clinton from the right on policing, suggesting that she supported “stop-and-frisk” policies but was not saying so for unstated political reasons. But in an attempt to damage her with black voters, he also invoked her use of the word “superpredator” in the 1990s to describe youthful criminals. “I think it was a terrible thing to say,” he said.

The debate was like no other in the television era: The first female presidential nominee of a major party facing off against an alpha male businessman with no political experience, both of them world-famous and both of them deeply unpo[CENSORED]r, with a potential record-setting audience of 100 million watching and hoping to see their preferred candidate blow the other to smithereens.

 
First Clinton and Trump Debate: Analysis
Mr. Trump seemed most confident when he accused Mrs. Clinton of lacking a record of success or results despite being in public life for 30 years. He tried to pin blame on her for decades of American policy, including the decision by her husband, Mr. Clinton, to sign the North American Free Trade Agreement into law, as well as her past support for the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

Continue reading the main story
Advertisement

Continue reading the main story
“Nafta is the worst trade deal maybe ever signed anywhere,” Mr. Trump said, invoking a pact that is deeply unpo[CENSORED]r in several swing states, and then added that the Trans-Pacific Partnership “will be almost as bad.” After Mrs. Clinton said she had opposed the trans-Pacific trade deal, Mr. Trump interjected and, raising his voice, talked over her.

“You called it the gold standard,” he said, nearly shouting.

Mrs. Clinton, in a measured tone and with a tight smile, responded with a harsh rejoinder of her own. “Donald, I know you live in your own reality, but that is not the facts,” she said.

Mr. Trump hurled so many accusations at Mrs. Clinton — and with such fervor that he frequently had to sip water — that she found herself saying at one point, “I have a feeling that by the end of this evening, I’m going to be blamed for everything that’s ever happened.”

“Why not?” Mr. Trump shot back.

“Why not? Yeah, why not,” Mrs. Clinton replied. “You know, just join the debate by saying more crazy things.”

Mrs. Clinton pressed Mr. Trump on his failure to release his tax returns, an issue that polls show is resonating with voters. She suggested that he had not made them public because they would show that “you haven’t paid any federal income tax for a lot of years.”

Slide Show

SLIDE SHOW
|
15 Photos
Photographs From the First Presidential Debate
Photographs From the First Presidential DebateCreditDamon Winter/The New York Times
Mr. Trump did not dispute that, saying instead that the government would waste his money.

“It would be squandered, too, believe me,” he said. At another point, he argued that he was “smart” to have avoided paying any federal income tax earlier in his career.

Mrs. Clinton assailed his economic policies as favoring wealthy Americans, calling them “trumped-up, trickle-down,” and then made the first of several attempts to bait Mr. Trump into an overreaction. She said that he had gotten a $14 million loan from his father to start his business and asserted that he “really believes the more you help wealthy people, the better off we’ll be.”

Mr. Trump responded simply that it was “a very small loan,” a sign that he had been prepared to be careful about attacking.

Mrs. Clinton also poked at Mr. Trump by saying he believed that climate change was a “hoax,” prompting him to interject, “I do not say that, I do not say that.” (He did, in 2012.)

He called himself “a great believer in all forms of energy” and said the nation had too much debt to risk jobs on energy policies that might protect the environment. Then he blasted Mrs. Clinton as a candidate with lots of policy ideas but no history of success.

“Hillary, you’ve been doing this for 30 years,” Mr. Trump said. “Why are you just thinking about these solutions?”

“I have thought about this quite a bit,” she said.

“Yeah, for 30 years,” he replied sarcastically.

Beyond the frequent policy clashes and vivid personality differences, the hostility between the two candidates was unmistakable. Mrs. Clinton was all icy stares and pointed rebukes, while avoiding the sort of prickly reactions that hurt Mr. Obama in his first debate against Mitt Romney in 2012 and were devastating to Al Gore in his initial debate against George W. Bush in 2000.

Mr. Trump looked more irritable and impatient as the night went on, and lost his cool when Mrs. Clinton noted that he had initially supported the war in Iraq.

“Wrong,” Mr. Trump said. “Wrong, wrong.”

Mr. Trump did signal support for the American invasion of Iraq at first, but when the moderator, Lester Holt of NBC News, pointed that out, Mr. Trump lashed out. “That is a mainstream media nonsense put out by her,” Mr. Trump said of Mrs. Clinton. When Mr. Holt said “the record shows otherwise,” Mr. Trump went on a long tangent about various antiwar comments he had made to allies like Sean Hannity of Fox News.

When cornered at times, Mr. Trump tried to shift the subject, criticizing Mrs. Clinton for using a private email server as secretary of state.

“I made a mistake using a private email,” Mrs. Clinton said.

“That’s for sure,” Mr. Trump said.

“And if I had to do it over again, I would, obviously, do it differently,” she added.

Mr. Trump would not let it go. “That was more than a mistake — that was done purposely,” he said. “When you have your staff taking the Fifth Amendment, taking the Fifth, so they’re not prosecuted, when you have the man that set up the illegal server taking the Fifth, I think it’s disgraceful.”

The debate was the first of three; the next will be on Oct. 9 in St. Louis and will use the format of a town meeting, with uncommitted voters asking about half of the questions. The third will be on Oct. 19 in Las Vegas and will feature the same format as Monday’s.