Everyone but Donald Trump and his most ardent supporters recognize that Donald Trump lost Monday night’s debate. And because of the candidate’s stubborn disbelief in his ability to do anything but win, Trump lost the post-debate period too.

Now he’s doubling down.


Despite warnings from fellow Republicans against insulting a beauty queen he disparaged for gaining weight and launching an attack on Hillary Clinton for her husband’s well-known infidelities, Trump is now directing his surrogates to do just that.

“Mr. Trump has never treated women the way Hillary Clinton and her husband did when they worked to destroy Bill Clinton’s accusers,” reads one of the talking points the campaign sent to surrogates on Thursday as the controversy surrounding the story of former Miss Universe Alicia Machado continued to dominate headlines of the race.

And during a rally Thursday afternoon in Bedford, N.H., Trump himself referenced the scandals of the 1990s that he’s been congratulating himself for not talking about all week. “The Clintons are the sordid past,” he said. “We will be the very bright and clean future.”

For three days since Clinton’s dominant debate performance, Trump and his team have been flailing wildly to change the meta-narrative coming out of the showdown. And they have yet to alight on anything to effectively spin the result, challenge the conventional wisdom that Clinton won or to change the subject to anything less damaging for the GOP nominee.

Inside Trump Tower, his inner circle of advisers has been in turmoil: while some have attempted to reach to the hard-headed candidate by suggesting to reporters that he must prepare more thoroughly for the second debate, others have spit-balled ideas aimed at changing the subject, including a last-minute trip to Israel that might replicate the more presidential optics and media saturation coverage they achieved with last month’s surprise summit with the Mexican president.

Trump himself has reportedly chided aides who have privately acknowledged to reporters that Clinton bested him on the debate stage.

But that private uncertainty and unease about what was so clearly a disappointing performance has oozed into public view. Since the debate Monday night, surrogates and Trump himself have both praised and criticized the moderator, Lester Holt. One of Trump’s closest confidants at the moment, Rudy Giuliani, said immediately after the debate that he’d advise Trump to skip the next two and on Wednesday indulged a conspiracy, propagated by a Russian state-controlled news site, that Clinton might have gotten the questions in advance. And on Thursday, campaign manager Kellyanne Conway said she had indeed told her candidate not to call women “fat pigs” but quickly tried to dismiss his insults as “beside the point” because he in fact supports women.

“With Trump, it’s always the tyranny of the urgent and right now it is he has to have people believe he won, or that if he didn't it was rigged and unfair,” said Rick Tyler, a GOP operative who worked on Ted Cruz’s presidential campaign. “The purpose of having 84 million people watch is to get more people on his campaign; that's winning. In his mind, it's just about winning the debate. The objective is actually winning the election.”

Trump’s backers have been more consistent in their adherence to another fatuous talking point, stating that Trump deserved credit for being “gentlemanly” and even “courageous” for not bringing up the subject of Bill Clinton’s infidelities that they are themselves bringing up, increasingly in less uncertain, veiled terms.

And the candidate has compounded the damage by failing or refusing to recognize the damage done by his assertion that avoiding paying income taxes “makes me smart” and his repetition of comments about how a former Miss Universe “gained a massive amount of weight” after he awarded her crown was “a real problem.”

In reality, both Trump’s tacit references to the Lewinsky scandal and his explicit references to the Miss Universe story—something Clinton’s campaign used knowingly to bait Trump and has since pushed into the news cycle—are likely to prevent him from expanding support among undecided women voters, a bloc that may tip the balance of the election more than any other.

“What has been relatively true in the general [election] is that when the news is about Trump, his numbers stagnate and drop. And it’s been the same pattern with her. Right now the story is all about him,” said Sarah Isgur Flores, whose former boss, Carly Fiorina, was also criticized by Trump for her appearance. “After the Megyn Kelly thing, after Carly’s thing, his voters know him. That doesn't mean they approve of it. They just think country has reached a point where they need big change. But holding his supporters is not enough heading into November. He had to build and this doesn't help building.”

Tyler put it bluntly: “He needs more women supporters, and reminding people he called someone Miss Piggy or Miss Housekeeper is not helpful.”

Desperate to put any sort of positive gloss on a disappointing debate performance, Trump’s campaign claimed to have seen an $18 million windfall in small-dollar online donations in the 24 hours after the debate.However, it’s not yet clear if that money is all from online contributions or how much of it will be available to Trump, as POLITICO reported Thursday.



Clinton’s campaign, meanwhile, is starting to put the pedal down. Even before the candidate mentioned Machado, her communications and rapid response operations had laid the groundwork. Machado had already done a photo shoot and interview with Cosmopolitan that popped online less than 24 hours after the debate. The campaign quickly organized a press call with Machado. They cut a video encapsulating the debate exchange and Machado’s story, which has been a staple of cable news coverage for 48 hours now. In swing states, women surrogates have been amplifying Clinton’s argument.

And Democrats have said they would love to see Trump try to tar Clinton for her husband’s cheating past, something veteran Republican operatives and GOP lawmakers desperately want their candidate to avoid.

“What you’ve seen in the last 48 hours is that Clinton actually has a campaign,” said Stuart Stevens, the GOP strategist behind Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign. “What you see is the Clinton campaign has an extra gear they can go into, and the Trump campaign really doesn’t.”

The biggest impediment to the campaign's ability to change gears quickly is the candidate, a person who resists change, struggles to accept constructive criticism and has reportedly lashed out at advisers who have been more critical in anonymous statements to the press.

Thursday afternoon, Trump's senior communications adviser Jason Miller refused to accept the premise that his boss had anything but an "excellent" debate, pointing to unscientific online polls--broadly dismissed by political professionals--that declared Trump the winner.

"The one dynamic driving this is that it's not about trying to win an election, it’s about trying to please Donald Trump," Stevens said. "Your ability to rise and fall in that organization is predicated on your willingness to say something that will please the boss."