Officially speaking, Monday night's debate was separated into three sections—achieving prosperity, America's direction, and securing America—but it didn't take long to explode into a range of issues from police-community relations to NATO to Donald Trump's business practices and Hillary Clinton's stamina. How to make sense of it all? Seriously, what just happened? We dialed in the experts on topics from criminal justice to international affairs to history, who detected some big moments that might have gotten drowned out in all the noise, from both candidates’ missed opportunities on foreign policy to an unprecedented invocation of direct racism on the presidential debate stage. And ... wasn't this thing supposed to have a Republican, too?

Clinton showed she’s as un-serious on foreign policy as Trump

Danielle Pletka is senior vice president for foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute.


Most of the debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump had passed before we got to national security. By that time, Trump had drifted—nay, sprinted—away from his strong opener to the rambling, bombastic incoherence that characterized his performance from about minute 20 until the end. And as when the blazing dumpster fire draws our attention away from the rodent-ridden alley, all eyes were drawn to the New York businessman, wondering what the hell he was going to say next. That’s a shame, because it was Hillary Clinton who articulated not a single fresh idea, not a single pivot away from the disastrous Obama years, not a single vision. Her foreign policy might well be summarized as “I’m not crazy Trump.”

And that’s far from enough. Consider the substance (and here I set aside the series of catcalls that pass for Trump foreign policy):

On cyber-security, an issue about which Clinton has already displayed some confusion, she stated that “we are not going to sit idly by and permit state actors to go after our information.” What does that mean? Given the cyberattacks we’ve witnessed, didn’t she sit idly by as secretary of state? "Not sitting" is not foreign policy.

Apparently Clinton has “a plan to defeat ISIS.” What is it? Literally, she led with “going after them online.” She threw in liberal hawk buzzword “intensify” about air strikes as if that represents a strategy. And she added that she would like to “take out their leadership.” Take that Al Qaeda and ISIS!

How do we protect the homeland? “An intelligence surge.” Cooperating with Muslim nations. That’s it, really. Oh, and Clinton loves the Iran deal. And NATO.

The former secretary of state closed her national security argument claiming, “Donald never tells you what he would do.” That’s spot on. The problem is, while Clinton is more polite, more temperate and well … more normal, in her own way she’s as unserious about national security as The Donald.

The performer wilted; the bureaucrat stepped up

Virginia Heffernan is author of Magic and Loss: The Internet as Art.

On the debate stage Monday night, Hillary Clinton notably called her opponent “Donald,” a transparent move to gain the whip hand. Donald Trump called Clinton “secretary,” but only after elaborately asking her permission, the way someone asks a vegan if she eats even bread, implying, “You’re so finicky, who knows what will bother you?” Even formal terms of address between politicians would be played for schoolyard advantage, it seemed.

Until Trump—the consummate bully, the master entertainer—wavered.

Soon enough, he lapsed into “Hillary.” His initial “secretary” ploy, which at first seemed moderately promising—and might have teed up a sneering riff on political correctness later—lost his attention. He couldn’t commit to the bit, or any bit. The same was true all night.

Yes, Trump, who never hit a false note as the capricious tyrant on The Apprentice, somehow kept straying from the role he had played so many times on the debate stage during the primaries: performer. “Message” has sometimes seemed protean with Trump, but his persona has always been brightly limned, his modest vocabulary serving as trusty scaffolding for a self as solid and simple as a cartoon. Tonight, however, that Trump-brand Trump slipped and slid, perhaps left wobbly without the crutch of a friendly crowd.

Rather than talk about the magnitude of his primary victory or the one he hopes for this fall, Trump openly envisioned losing—twice. “If I don’t get to Pennsylvania Avenue one way, I’m going to get there another,” he said, referring to his company’s new hotel in Washington, D.C., just down the street from the White House. When asked if he would abide by the outcome of the vote in November—Trump has suggested he fears voter fraud—he dodged the question, rambled a bit, then, when pressed again, closed out the night with these final non-rousing words: “If she wins, I will absolutely support her.”

The strongman didn’t look so strong. As the debate came to a close, Trump himself confessed that he had fallen short of his usual routine: “I was going to say something extremely rough to Hillary, to her family. And I said to myself, I can’t do it. I just can’t do it. It’s inappropriate, it’s not nice.” I can’t do it. He was talking like a loser.

Debate previews had suggested that Clinton’s prep team was worried about her detail-packed disquisitions coming across as overly focus-grouped. They needn’t have. Trump, who was expected to speak simple and with feeling, conjured internecine battles involving consultants and media people that must have been moving and powerful to exactly … no one. Sidney Blumenthal, Patti Solis Doyle, Wolf Blitzer, Sean Hannity, Debbie Wasserman Schultz: Trump sounded positively wonky, like any old Beltway cable pundit.

As for Clinton, she has a less clearly etched stage persona than Trump, and seemed to come in committed to a predictably studied style. But, especially early in the debate, she deployed an imperious way of looking soap-operatically classy and above-it-all, with a supercilious smile and complicated headwork. It’s possible she was aiming for the Texan Woman Exception, identified by the linguist Deborah Tannen (and cited recently in the Atlantic), which states that of all women, only Texans can pull off tough and brassy without being called shrill. Clinton did not seem Texan. She seemed smug, long-suffering. When Trump interrupted her, she did a pursed-lip “I’ll just wait” move that some substitute teachers employ. It didn’t serve her. But because Trump didn’t appear very threatening, she seemed to decide she didn’t need armor. She dropped the fake Ann Richards act after about 20 minutes.

The surprise was that Clinton did have something to fall back on. Not the fake Arkansas accent of her early years in public service, not the you-go-girl pantsuits thing from 2008, not a “love and kindness” Age of Aquarius jam. Standing at a podium, in command of the facts, Clinton fell back on herself—a clear-eyed strategist, with unlovely Midwestern vowels and a map of geopolitics in her mind at all times. She seemed happy to be there.

Trump missed a historical opportunity on tax cuts

Josh Zeitz has taught American history and politics at Cambridge University and Princeton University and is the author of Lincoln’s Boys: John Hay, John Nicolay, and the War for Lincoln's Image.

Watching Monday night’s debate in the moment, it was easy to see each candidate as the embodiment of our current political polarization. Democrats, we all know, are reflexive tax-and-spenders. Republicans are tax-cutting fanatics with a mystical faith in the power of supply-side economics. Slipping into those traditional partisan roles, Clinton mocked “Trumped-Up, Trickle Down economics,” and Trump claimed that Clinton would tax America back to the Stone Ages (or at least the Carter administration).

But if those notes felt off in this strange policy year, where Trump has dispensed with nearly all the GOP's economic norms, they were even futher off if you consider the history they might have invoked. Were Trump a student of history, he might have pointed out that while Democrats frequently point to Reaganomics as an invidious form of class warfare, some of the largest and most productive tax cuts in modern American history were the work of two Democratic presidents: John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson.

The story goes something like this: In 1962, presidential aide Walter Heller convinced John Kennedy, and later LBJ, that the economy was underperforming by $30 billion. A tax cut–even one that increased the deficit temporarily–would stimulate growth, close the gap between economic potential and performance, and achieve full employment. Ironically, though the measure was born in a Democratic White House, some of its sharpest critics were liberal economists. Leon Keyserling, who served as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under Harry Truman, agreed that the tax cut would stimulate the economy but calculated that the wealthiest 12 percent of Americans would reap almost half of its savings, an outcome that struck them as both unjust and unlikely to help the economy much. The liberal economist John Kenneth Galbraith argued for stimulus spending instead. Michael Harrington, whose work on the hidden scourge of poverty had done so much to inspire the liberal imagination, scored the tax cut as “reactionary Keynesianism.”

Yet the tax cut appeared to accomplish what its framers intended. In late February 1964, LBJ signed into law the Revenue Act of 1964, which sharply reduced individual income tax rates. The results were almost instantaneous. In 1965 GNP exceeded even the CEA’s optimistic forecast by a whopping $9 billion. “Tax relief, in massive doses, appears to have achieved something like magic,” marveled U.S. News and World Report.

There are meaningful differences between the Kennedy/Johnson and Reagan tax cuts. But Trump missed an opportunity to claim a bipartisan mantle. And perhaps Clinton, too, missed an opportunity to remind Americans that Democrats have in past decades reduced the tax burden on the middle class.

At the debate, who did the better job of sounding like someone else?

Julie Sedivy has taught linguistics and psychology at Brown University and the University of Calgary, and is the co-author of Sold on Language: How Advertisers Talk to You and What This Says About You.

In Monday night’s presidential debate, Donald Trump was challenged about his claim that Hillary Clinton lacked “a presidential look.” In truth, this was a test of whether the candidates sounded presidential, a chance for voters to assess two candidates whose communication styles have left lingering reservations.

Clinton’s cool and technical language has reinforced perceptions that she is disconnected from many Americans, whereas Trump’s visceral style has left doubts about whether he can temper his passions when context demands it. To move voters, both Trump and Clinton were under pressure to stretch beyond their usual communicative range.

For Clinton, this pressure is complex. Research shows that women who speak with emotional intensity are seen as less competent than men who do the same. Achieving that “presidential look” means she has to be masculine enough, but not emasculating or heartless. She has struggled with this over the years; in a study of 567 interviews and debates, researcher Jennifer Jones concluded that Clinton’s speaking style became more masculine with her growing political involvement and power, but that she struggled to find her rhetorical footing during the 2008 campaign, swinging between more masculine and feminine styles.

On Monday, both candidates responded with noticeable shifts in language. Trump still leaned heavily on emotional trigger words (companies are “stealing our jobs”) and stacking adverbs and adjectives (“It’s bad, bad experience”; “We are in a big, fat, ugly bubble.”) But Debate Trump was far more restrained than Rally Trump, to the point of uttering acquiescent sentences such as, “As far as child care is concerned and so many other things, I think Hillary and I agree on that. We probably disagree a little bit as to numbers and amounts.”

Clinton’s language was more forceful and direct than usual. Though she opened the debate with reference to her granddaughter’s birthday, she kept her sentences fairly short and simple. She talked about planning to “take out ISIS,” about coming back from the “abyss” of the recession, about how it's important to “grip this and deal with it” and about Trump “stiffing” his employees.

The strain of speaking in a different voice showed more on Trump than Clinton. He sniffed and fidgeted and sipped his water; she locked her gaze at the camera and showed no evidence of having bodily needs. His responses became increasingly disorganized and irrelevant; hers, though obviously rehearsed, maintained a tight structure, circling back to the moderator’s question even after launching an attack on Trump, and articulating connections between principles and specifics. His sentences were often syntactically defective; hers displayed a neat rhetorical rhythm (“Unfortunately, race still determines too much, 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.”)

Perhaps most striking was the fact that Trump, self-described voice of those left behind, appeared to forget entirely about the voters who were watching him outside the debate hall. At his rallies, he stirs up the crowd by addressing them directly and, as many of them have said, speaking the things they can’t say aloud. On Monday, almost every instance of the pronoun “you” was directed at Clinton in one of his private skirmishes with her—about his support for the Iraq War, about not paying his taxes, about not paying his workers, and what he has said about women.

Clinton, on the other hand, did not appear to forget for one moment that she was on a national stage. She addressed the audience directly at the beginning and end of the debate. And she even seemed to speak for the country toward the end when she declared: “I want to reassure our allies in Japan and South Korea and elsewhere that we have mutual defense treaties and we will honor them.”

The party that wasn't there

Matt Latimer is a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush. He is currently a co-partner in Javelin, a literary agency and communications firm based in Alexandria, and contributing editor at Politico Magazine.

Perhaps the most striking feature about last night’s debate was the absence of the Republican Party, at least as we have come to know it. Even the party’s once revered first family, including the GOP’s last two-term president, was a no-show, either in person or in spirit. Oddly, if anyone had a favorable thing to say about the Bush family, it would have been Hillary Clinton, who on Monday touted the endorsements of former Bush officials. Before the debate began, by contrast, Trump was reaching out to supporters of socialist Bernie Sanders.

To be sure, there was one familiar exchange over Ronald Reagan’s tax cuts, and Hillary Clinton’s vague (and rather groan-worthy) attack on “trickle down” economics. But the brief contretemps seemed perfunctory and dated, with all the modern day relevance of the Garfield era.

Throughout his unorthodox campaign, and quite remarkably, Donald Trump has completely jettisoned what only a year ago was Republican orthodoxy on trade, on entitlement reform, on infrastructure, on the war in Iraq. Last nigth the severing was complete. To wit, the Republican nominee began the debate aggressively lamenting the “rip off” of NAFTA, one of the trade deals about which Republicans used to regularly brag. He sharply attacked the Trans-Pacific Partnership, another deal that Republicans made with the Obama administration. He talked about wasting money on the Iraq war – the signature issue of the Bush era, to which many Republicans in that very audience had once pledged unrelenting fealty – while our roads, airports, and bridges were crumbling (the usual talking points of Washington Democrats). Mrs. Clinton, by contrast, hardly bothered with her usual attacks on the Republican Party, since many of the party’s elites are gingerly backing her.

For Republicans who spent many years advocating policies now abandoned with, well, abandon, it was hard to know what to think about a worldview being remade before their very eyes, and a debate without anyone to represent them. Indeed, the only traditional Republican on that stage Monday night was Lester Holt.

A candidate dropped the R-bomb

Nicole Hemmer is assistant professor at the University of Virginia's Miller Center, co-host of the Past Present podcast and author of Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics.

It was a first for a modern presidential debate. When Hillary Clinton described Donald Trump’s actions as “racist,” she used a word that has never been used in a televised debate—and likely has never been used in any presidential debate.

The charge came during a surprisingly frank discussion of racism from Clinton. In past presidential debates, discussion of race in the United States has often been discussed in the distancing language of “race relations” or “racial problems.” In the past two election cycles, with the first black nominee, then the first black president on the stage, race wasn’t mentioned a single time over the course of six debates. (The closest they came was in 2008, when John McCain expressed his frustration with the suggestion that he was racist.)

With discussions of race absent in the last two debate cycles, the depth and nuance Clinton brought to the issue was striking. When asked how she would heal the racial divide in America, Clinton spoke in terms of individual hearts and minds, which she then connected to the larger issue of systemic racism.

Clinton is not the first to discuss racism in personal terms. In a 1992 debate, Bill Clinton discussed his personal experience growing up in the segregated south. Hillary Clinton, however, did not just draw from personal experience, she connected the issue of personal prejudice— “implicit bias,” as she put it—to its effect on the pressing issue of discrimination and policing.

But where Clinton got revolutionary was in talking about the personal racism of her opponent. It came after the moderator, Lester Holt, asked Trump about his role in perpetuating the birtherism lie. Trump tried once again to pin birtherism on Clinton’s 2008 campaign, and then crowed (falsely) about his role in ending the birther lie.

That’s when Clinton went in for the kill. She slammed Trump for his role in perpetuating the “racist birther lie,” then broadened her attacked by pointing to Trump’s own history with discrimination. Noting that in the 1970s he faced two lawsuits from the Justice Department for racial discrimination, Clinton said, “So he has a long record of engaging in racist behavior.”

Note that this is different from calling Trump a racist directly. She instead used the label to qualify his words and actions. But the use of the charge in a televised presidential debate is unprecedented, underscoring just how unusual the 2016 race is.

Maybe the closest we’ve gotten to a similar divide between the candidates on racial issues was in the debate between Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter in 1980. While Carter didn’t claim his opponent was racist, he similarly drew on Reagan’s past: “I noticed that Governor Reagan said that when he was a younger man that there was no knowledge of a racial problem in this country,” Carter said. “Those who suffered from discrimination because of race or sex certainly knew we had a racial problem.” Reagan, much like Trump’s comment on Monday that black and Hispanic people were “living in hell,” pointed to the failures of government spending for young unemployed black people, ending with a specific case: “With regard to the great progress that has been made with this government spending, the rate of black unemployment in Detroit, Michigan, is 56 percent.” Reagan’s Detroit could just as easily be Trump’s Chicago.

This is the key difference: Carter hammered Reagan on his failure to agree with policies like unemployment and minimum wage increases; he called his opponent insensitive to these people’s struggles. He did not call him racist.

And the uniqueness of the racist charge on stage is due to the uniqueness of this election. Given the Trump campaign’s associations with white supremacist groups and the alt-right, and given Trump’s personal history with discrimination, racism has been front and center in this election. From his slowness to disavow David Duke to the frequency with which his son (and surrogate) retweets racist memes, Trump has created a campaign that provides a safe haven for racists.

Critics have long pointed to journalists and politicians’ preference for euphemisms like “racially tinged” or “racially charged” or “insensitive” when the word “racist” could have worked. In this debate, there was no such tip-toeing.

Trump sounded like he was talking to black voters. He wasn't.

Issac J. Bailey is a columnist at the Sun News in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. He’s the author of Proud. Black. Southern. (But I Still Don’t Eat Watermelon in front of White People).

“African Americans and Hispanics are living in hell,” Trump said Monday night of Democrats’ neglect of the lives of people of color. “You walk down the street and you get shot.”

Trump’s point, that the Democratic Party for decades has taken the black vote for granted, rings true in the minds of many black voters. It’s part of the reason I’ve voted for a variety of Republicans myself. “Trump just spoke the gospel about the Democratic Party,” commentator and professor Marc Lamont Hill, an African American activist who has been making the same point for years, tweeted during that exchange.

There are Republicans who could have credibly made that point. Rand Paul, who has spoken eloquently about the need for criminal justice reform and racial disparities for years, is one of them. Or just about any of the other 16 GOP presidential candidate.

But the Republicans had someone else on stage, someone touting the racial-profiling program known as stop-and-frisk; telling black people they live in Hell; and bragging about the dog whistle that is “law and order.” He rose to national political prominence on the bigotry of birtherism, and took a victory lap on the issue Monday night.

Clinton, meanwhile, hit most of the right points, talking about implicit bias and the beauty and power of the African-American church and the need to hold police officers accountable while increasing the level of trust between cops and communities. She has come on strong about gun control policies that are toxic in the Republican Party but are seen as vital among activists who are trying to prevent violence in some of our nation’s largest cities.

Her policy points were clear: No more mandatory minimums, no more private prisons and a presidential budget that will include money to help better train cops on implicit bias and how to better handle the mentally ill. Young millennials of color probably didn’t get fired up about her responses and likely wanted more, but the contrast with what Trump is offering was too stark to miss.

Trump, it was clear, was still just using people of color as political props while promising to make their lives worse with race-based and criminal justice policies that have already destroyed or harmed millions of black families. He still wasn’t talking to us, or even about us, only a distorted version of who bigots believe we are. When asked about what he could do to bring a racial healing to the country, Trump answered: “I say nothing.” That was his most honest moment of the night.

On Hillary's foreign policy vulnerability, Trump whiffed

Aaron David Miller is vice president for new initiatives and a distinguished scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

Paradoxically, nowhere were the potential risks greater for Hillary Clinton than in the segment relating to national security and foreign policy. This, after all, was her sweet spot: As a former secretary of State, senator and first lady, she knew had both practical experience and a substantive grasp of the issues. All candidate Donald Trump needed to do tonight was appear somewhat knowledgeable, keep his calm, and act presidential and poised as a potential Commander in Chief.

And despite the low bar, Mr. Trump failed to clear it. Having worked for Republicans and Democrats (and voted for both, too) I say this not as partisan or cheerleader; but as an objective and common sense read on the evening.

Indeed, the last 30 minutes of the debate—the “Securing America” section—was Mr. Trump’s weakest and seemed to validate his detractors’ criticism that he’s uniquely and stunningly unprepared, ill-suited temperamentally, and not ready for the prime time of the presidency.

On Iraq, Mr. Trump fell back repeatedly on the factually inaccurate notion that he had never supported the Iraq war. He doubled down and angrily asserted a revisionist version of his stance, referencing conversations with Fox News hosts that backed up his own position. In response, both Lester Holt and Mrs. Clinton called him out—leaving him flatfooted and without a compelling comeback.

On ISIS, Mr. Trump fell back again on a policy response that was vacuous and incoherent. Mrs. Clinton’s policy approach was not her best moment either. But Mr. Trump again raised the fantastical notion that if only the U.S. would have taken Iraq’s oil, ISIS could have been defeated. Along with the extraordinary assertion earlier in the hour when he accused Mrs. Clinton of ineffectively fighting ISIS all of her adult life—a remarkable howler—Mr. Trump turned in one of his most rambling performances on an issue of great concern, particularly to his own constituency.

On NATO and U.S. allies, Mr. Trump tripped up on a point that has resonated effectively for him—that NATO allies aren’t paying their fare share for their defense—by insisting that NATO allies weren’t involved in counter-terrorism efforts alongside the U.S. Mrs. Clinton countered that the only time NATO’s Article 5—the agreement that an attack on one NATO member is an attack on all of them—has been invoked was when U.S. allies committed to join the U.S. military efforts in response to 9/11.

On Cyber, Mr. Trump failed to address what moderator Lester Holt described as a central challenge to U.S. security. Indeed, his initial response to the question — that 200 admirals and generals and ICE had endorsed him—was off-message and particularly ineffective. His defense of Russia against Mrs. Clinton’s accusation that Moscow may have been responsible for much of the hacking was particularly self-serving, as was the implication that Russia did the country a favor by exposing the DNC’s bias against Bernie Sanders.

For Mr. Trump’s detractors (and a good many undecided voters, I suspect), the last 30 minutes of the debate confirmed an image of an off-balance, rambling, flustered and frustrated candidate hoping somehow that the debate would end.

Instead of conveying the image of a strong leader remaining calm under pressure, what we saw was a volatile combustible candidate trumpeting his winning temperament. That this quasi-meltdown came during a discussion of national security policy where Americans expect a calm-but-tough and self-confident president created even more of a deficit for a candidate who simply wasn’t ready for primetime.

Trump dug in on “Stop-and-Frisk” while also dodging

Richard Primus is the Theodore J. St. Antoine Collegiate Professor at the University of Michigan Law School. Follow him on Twitter at @Richard_Primus.

Donald Trump returned to one of his campaign talking points tonight, praising the stop-and-frisk policing policy that New York City implemented under Mayors Rudolph Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg. When moderator Lester Holt intervened on a point of fact—something he restrained himself from doing for much of the debate—and pointed out to Trump that “stop-and-frisk” had been held unconstitutional, Trump doubled down. Stop-and-frisk had not been held unconstitutional, Trump claimed: the case had been assigned to a judge who was biased against the police, and the ruling wasn’t upheld on appeal, because New York City Mayor Bill DeBlasio decided to discontinue stop-and-frisk rather than continuing the litigation.

As a matter of debating tactics, this was a skillful parry by Trump. It’s true that an appellate panel criticized the judge who handled the stop-and-frisk case—Judge Shira Scheindlin—for compromising her appearance of impartiality in the case, largely through comments she made to the media. (It later cleared her of any misconduct.) And it is also true that no appellate court ever upheld the ruling, because New York City declined to appeal. Trump, as he often does, succeeded in putting just enough fog around the issue to make it seem uncertain.

And as a matter of politics, it’s clear why Trump would dig in. Stop-and-frisk resonates powerfully with voters who want to hear a get-tough, law-and-order candidate.

But Trump’s move was also something of a dodge. It didn’t acknowledge the reality that the court whose ruling is still the last legal judgment on the matter did hold stop-and-frisk unconstitutional. Nor did it grapple with the problem of racial discrimination that lay at the heart of the constitutional challenge to the stop-and-frisk policy.

The case, formally called Floyd v. City of New York, was built on mammoth piles of statistical analysis showing that New York City police systematically stopped and frisked nonwhite people at rates far higher than they stopped and frisked white people, and the differences couldn’t be explained away by other factors. The case also featured testimony from police sources directly confirming that New York City police were often instructed to treat nonwhite people as suspicious in circumstances where white people doing the same things would not have been regarded as suspicious. In other words, Floyd rested on a thorough and detailed record showing racial profiling by the police.

Public safety improved in New York City dramatically during recent decades, and the city’s police officers and public-safety policymakers deserve an important share of the credit—though it’s hard to say how much stop-and-frisk contributed to the improvement. After all, stop-and-frisk was instituted after crime in New York had already fallen substantially, and crime continued to go down after the policy was terminated. And given the factual record, it is hard to see how one can endorse New York’s stop-and-frisk policy without endorsing racial discrimination in policing. Which might, for a certain constituency, be exactly the point.