Ever since the first presidential debate ended on Monday, Donald Trump and his surrogates have done everything possible to obfuscate the truth because they know he got walloped. Immediately after the debate, Trump got Fox News’ Sean Hannity to cover for his repeated lies about opposing the Iraq war. Using Hannity, Alex Jones, and Matt Drudge, the campaign widely circulated highly unscientific online polls saying that Trump won the debate. His campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, argued that his “restraint”—meaning the fact that he only alluded to Bill Clinton’s affairs without bringing them up outright—was a “presidential virtue” that would help win over women. And Trump blamed the microphone for capturing more than a few low-energy sniffles throughout the evening.

All debate performances result in spin, but bad ones lead to especially egregious spinning, hence the Trump campaign’s flailing on Tuesday. Nonetheless, they got one thing right: For the first 15 minutes of the debate, before he had an hourlong tantrum, Trump got the upper hand on trade. Surrogates seized on the silver lining in the spin room and beyond, and Trump, lampooned for most of his performance, was praised by a good deal of the press for the way he started the debate.

Trump has a strong case to make on trade, when he makes it. He made it once and then chased shiny objects for most of the debate. — Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) September 27, 2016

Trump did not “win” the trade portion of the debate so much as Clinton lost it. Trump’s understanding on trade is at best simplistic; at worst, it’s a total fantasy. Whenever he gets into specifics, he betrays his deep-seated ignorance of basic policy. Trump began the debate by saying, “Thank you, Lester. Our jobs are fleeing the country.” This is not true—we’ve added jobs for the last 78 months—but it set the (Millenarian) tone of the next ten minutes. During the portion on trade, Trump claimed that Ford Motor Company was rushing to get out of the country (it isn’t), that China is devaluing its currency (it’s propping it up), and that Mexico and China were thriving because of the jobs they had stolen from us (neither country is thriving).





Trump has been saying this for the last 15 months. It’s effective not because it’s true, or because it suggests a plausible plan of action, but because it speaks to the pain and anger felt in many of the former manufacturing areas of the country that have been particularly hard hit over the last 40 years. The North American Free Trade Agreement, which was negotiated by George H. W. Bush and signed into law by Clinton’s husband, may not be directly responsible for as much of that pain as it has been blamed for over the past three decades. But Trump’s bleak portrait of life in middle America suggests a knowledge of areas hard hit by the decline in manufacturing—blighted areas like my home town in central New York—that isn’t present in Clinton’s Reaganesque paeans to the goodness and greatness of America. Trump may not know what he’s talking about on trade, but his message is working.

Clinton had the upper-hand for most of the debate because she was able to bait Trump into proving her point for her: She got him to admit to housing discrimination when she accused him of racism, and to say Rosie O’Donnell had it coming when she accused him of sexism. But at the beginning of the debate, when the audience was at its largest, Trump was calling the shots: He argued that Clinton was just another politician who was saying things just to get elected. And then Clinton… said things that made her sound like just another politician who was just saying things to get elected. Take this exchange, Trump’s strongest of the night: