Donald Trump on Tuesday morning floated the idea that he “may hit her harder” next time around against Hillary Clinton. | Getty Trump points fingers after shaky debate But after a day of feuding, Trump came back to a familiar script Tuesday night in front of a friendly crowd.

After a long night on Long Island on Monday, Donald Trump showed no signs of wavering at an evening rally inside an airport hangar in Melbourne, Florida in front of a friendly crowd.

A day removed from the debate stage, Trump stuck close to his stump speech, repeating familiar refrains about himself, about Hillary Clinton, about his vision for his presidency and about the country he sees in front of him. The lone wrinkle to his stump speech was a new wave of claims about how he’d won the debate. Pointing to his wins in numerous, un-scientific online reader polls on websites like the Drudge Report, Trump was no more deterred by a broad sentiment among political observers that he’d lost than he was by an army of fact-checkers who’ve found many of his favorite claims are false.


Indeed, back in the familiar confines of a rally, Trump appeared more comfortable than the night before, leveling strong attacks against Clinton that, after repeating throughout the election, he often stayed away from Monday.

Trump also cast the debate as a contrast between change and the status quo. “For 90 minutes on issue after issue Hillary Clinton defended the terrible status quo while I laid out our plan, all of us together, to bring jobs prosperity and security back to the American people,” he said. “For 90 minutes she argued against change while I called for dramatic change.”

He also revealed how he dealt with his nerves in front of a television audience of 80 million people. “I knew I was going into a situation where you were going to have one of the largest audiences in the history of television. And I took a deep breath and I pretended I was talking to my family,” Trump said. “It was very interesting. You just block it out.”

“Does everybody believe me? I was against going into Iraq,” said Trump, after the timeline of his opinions came under scrutiny once again on Monday night. (Before the invasion Trump expressed approval of it in a Howard Stern interview, and is only documented as firmly opposing it in an interview well after the American occupation of the country began.)

Of the current state of the country, Trump lamented, “We have death and debt and unemployment. We have all bad things.” He called Clinton “a representative for globalists” and mocked last month’s consensus that he had only the narrowest electoral path to the presidency, remarking, “Oh wow, now they’re looking at all these paths.”

Trump did steer clear of another post-debate controversy, an ongoing war of words with former Miss Universe Alicia Machado, who was the centerpiece of one of Clinton’s attacks on his character. Trump earlier Tuesday again criticized Machado's weight, echoing Clinton allegations that he’d earlier called her “Miss Piggy” — due to her body shape — and “Miss Housekeeping,” a racist reference to her Latino heritage.

But on Tuesday evening, back in front of a large, boisterous, adoring crowd, Trump avoided the subject entirely.

The rally followed a tumultuous 24 hours for Trump, starting with a panned debate performance Monday that morphed into a day of finger-pointing Tuesday, as he revived his brashest personal style to explain an erratic debate performance.

The GOP nominee, beleaguered after an erratic performance in Monday’s debate — with viewership as high as 100 million — retreated to his Fox News and Twitter cocoon. There, he took potshots at debate moderator Lester Holt and cited unscientific Internet surveys to prove he’d outperformed Hillary Clinton. And his advisers hinted that he might consider skipping the next showdown between the candidates, set for Oct. 9 in St. Louis.

It was a scarcely concealed defensive posture from the Trump camp, which found itself defending Trump against accusations of sexism (even as he redoubled his criticism of a former Miss Universe he had previously called “Miss Piggy,” saying on Tuesday she had gained “a massive amount of weight”). His surrogates, too, joined the pile-on against Holt, describing “hostile” questioning about his position on the Iraq War, his role in the birther controversy and his refusal to release his tax returns.

Trump spent his post-debate morning in the friendly confines of Fox, calling in to “Fox & Friends” for a gentle interview, where the hosts agreed he had been asked too many tough questions. Trump couched his concerns about Holt around mild praise of his performance as moderator, but his allies correctly pointed out that Holt reserved his most probing and personal questions for the businessman and spared Clinton similarly tough questions about her handling of classified information or her untrustworthy persona.

“You know, when you look at it, you watch the last four questions, he hit me on birther,” Trump said, “He hit me on a housing deal from many years ago that I settled with no recourse and no guilt. He asked me about that.”

But actually, it was Clinton who raised the 1973 housing discrimination lawsuit against Trump’s company. She also grilled him about paying no income tax over the years. Trump’s “That makes me smart” reply has Democrats salivating. (Clinton at a rally on Tuesday afternoon asked the crowd, “if not paying taxes makes him smart, what does that make all the rest of us?”)

Trump on Tuesday morning floated the idea that he “may hit her harder” next time around, and explained, “I really eased up because I didn't want to hurt anybody's feelings.”

It was remarkable how many subjects Trump decided to skip in Monday’s debate. He made no mention of Clinton’s handling of the attack on an American compound in Benghazi. He scarcely alluded to his aggressive seal-the-borders stance on immigration, despite making it the hallmark of his campaign. Trump didn’t mention controversies about Clinton Foundation or her ties to Wall Street. (Clinton actually got in the only Wall Street-based attack, suggesting Trump was hundreds of millions of dollars in debt to big banks.)

Trump also skipped any mention of Clinton’s decision to label some of his supporters “deplorable.” And even as she skewered him for misleading about his position on the war in Iraq, he made only a passing mention of the fact that Clinton voted to go to war in the first place.

“Well, he didn't ask her about the emails at all. He didn't ask her about her scandals. He didn't ask her about the Benghazi deal that she destroyed,” he said about Holt. “He didn't ask her about a lot of things she should have been asked about. I mean, you know, there's no question about it. He didn't ask about her foundation.”

Holt wasn’t the only target of Trump’s ire. He also peddled a conspiracy theory that his microphone had been tampered with, as he sought to explain why he may not have been at the top of his game, even as he claimed numerous online polls deemed him the night’s winner.

“I don’t know if you saw that in the room, but my microphone was terrible. I wonder, was it set up that way on purpose?” Trump asked on Fox.

Clinton reveled in Trump’s squirming. Buoyant from the prior night, the former secretary of state gaggled with reporters on her plane, offering a verbal shrug to the notion that Trump may not show up to the next two debates, and landing a zinger about Trump’s microphone theory.

“Anybody who complains about the microphone is not having a good night,” Clinton quipped as she walked away from reporters.

Trump’s surrogates sought to frame the debate as a win for the Republican nominee, largely because he didn’t bring up Bill Clinton’s extramarital affairs, even though Trump alluded to them later in the evening.

Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s campaign manager, said on Tuesday morning that “as a woman” she was impressed that Trump pulled back from bringing up the affairs after Clinton attacked him for a long history of misogynistic comments.

“To tell Hillary Clinton after she accused him of being terrible with women, to tell Hillary Clinton 'I was prepared to go rough tonight and I am not going to do it because your husband and daughter are here.' That is going to grow in importance in the next couple of days in a moment of great temperance and restraint,” Conway told MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”

Trump’s running mate, Mike Pence, parroted the talking points on CBS’s “This Morning,” also saying he was “so proud” that Trump didn’t bring up Bill Clinton’s indiscretions.

“Ninety minutes in a row of one insult after another and then Donald Trump, just completely open and transparent with the American people, said, ‘There’s things I could bring up, we all know what they are, we all lived through the 1990’s,’ and he just said ‘I’m not going to do it.'” Pence said. “I think there you saw in him the restraint and temperament that would make for a good president.”

While Trump’s allies argued that Trump had cleared an arguably low bar during his first primetime showdown, House Speaker Paul Ryan offered unusually effusive praise for the Republican nominee.

Ryan has frequently clashed with Trump on style and substance, but he said the billionaire did what he needed to do on Monday night. For Republican lawmakers concerned about Trump’s effect on down-ballot races, the fact that Trump did not implode on stage was a relief.

“I saw Donald Trump give a spirited voice to those of us who don’t like the status quo, and I see emerging in front of us the potential for what a unified Republican government can get you, which can be the solutions,” Ryan said at a news conference Tuesday. “I think he passed a number of thresholds... and showed that for 90 minutes he could go toe-to-toe with Hillary Clinton.”

Most pundits agreed Trump’s strongest part of the debate was the first 20 to 30 minutes, when he parried Clinton’s barbs and painted her as a typical politician – the kind he certainly is not. In a discussion of the country’s international trade deals, Trump thrashed Clinton as taking a politically motivated tack.

“In all fairness to Secretary Clinton, when she started talking about this, it was really very recently,” he said. “She's been doing this for 30 years. And why hasn't she made the agreements better? The NAFTA agreement is defective … Secretary Clinton and others, politicians, should have been doing this for years, not right now, because of the fact that we've created a movement.”

Trump said he’d tax companies who send jobs and plants to other countries and sell their products back to the United States.

“What you do is you say, fine, you want to go to Mexico or some other country, good luck. We wish you a lot of luck,” he said. “But if you think you're going to make your air conditioners or your cars or your cookies or whatever you make and bring them into our country without a tax, you're wrong.”

Trump’s camp is already hinting he’s considering taking a pass on the next debate. Trump surrogate Rudy Giuliani told reporters Monday night that he’d advise Trump to drop out of the next meeting because the moderators wouldn’t be fair.

“If I were Donald Trump I wouldn’t participate in another debate unless I was promised that the journalist would act like a journalist and not an incorrect, ignorant fact checker,” Giuliani said. “The moderator would have to promise that there would be a moderator and not a fact checker and in two particular cases an enormously ignorant, completely misinformed fact checker.”

Clinton and her allies, on the other hand, are blanketing the airwaves. Priorities USA immediately launched an ad blasting Trump’s temperament. The Clinton campaign issued its own blistering video: an interview with Alicia Machado, the former Miss Universe winner who said Trump demeaned her when she gained weight.

Campaign strategist Joel Benenson told CNN on Tuesday that Clinton was calm and collected under pressure while Trump became unhinged.

“The reason why Hillary Clinton overwhelmingly won in this debate is because Donald Trump was a loose cannon throughout the debate,” Benenson said. “He was interrupting. He doesn't listen to anybody. He doesn't respect anybody. He was shouting.”

In addition, Clinton, her running mate Tim Kaine and her husband, former President Bill Clinton hit the trail for her, hoping to capture some momentum from the debate. CNN's post-debate polling showed viewers largely found Clinton superior to Trump, though it’s unclear whether the debate will lead to movement in the swing-state polls, which have shown the two candidates in a dead heat.

Louis Nelson, Nolan D. McCaskill, and Madeline Conway contributed to this report.