Clinton Vs. Trump: A Strong Start, But A Weird Finish

Last night, as Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump debated for the first time in the presidential election, WGBH News' Peter Kadzis and Adam Reilly live-debated the debate via electronic mail. 

Peter, I was all set to say that my big question, heading into what might be the most-watched presidential debate ever, is whether Lester Holt will or won't opt to fact-check the candidates in real time. But I've decided that query is too narrow. The real question, I think, is whether American politics has entered a phase in which facts simply don't matter. As The New York Times has meticulously  documented, Donald Trump makes more erroneous claims in a week than most candidates make in ... a lot more than that. Yet it hasn't seemed to matter! The  polls show Trump gaining and Clinton losing steam. Meanwhile, Trump's surrogates openly  acknowledge his problem with facts—while insisting that it's a non-issue, since he's tuned into a bigger, more essential truth. Here's how Newt Gingrich put it:

Maybe Trump's consistent willingness to play fast and loose with the facts would have hurt him more if so many people didn't have such deep distrust for his opponent. Who knows? Thus far, though, it doesn't seem to have hurt him much at all. And I don't think assiduous fact-checking by Holt, or Bloomberg TV, or anyone else is likely to change that.

What say you?

Before I answer your profound and pertinent question, I need to get something off my chest.

Presidential debates don't matter as much as we in journalism think they do. First of all, the more debates we have, the more trivial and debased they become. The Kennedy-Nixon debate, which took place exactly 56 years ago tonight, was a Socratic dialogue compared to more recent contests. This is not because the good-old days were a golden age. The media climate, the media business, has changed. Spectacle, not substance, is the order of the day. Sure, in 1976 President Gerald Ford's crazy claim the nations behind the Iron Curtain—such as Poland—were not slaves to Soviet influence appeared to seal his fate as a loser to Jimmy Carter. But that was just the most significant of many mistakes. Polls will go up in down after tonight's debate. But that's what they would do anyway. Still, it's all exciting and great theater.

Now, to your question. The Los Angeles Times reported within the last day or two that Donald Trump is the most untruthful candidate for president in history. That's quite an accomplishment. Hillary Clinton certainly has her own problems with the truth when it comes to emails. By and large, Trump and Clinton are the two most mistrusted candidates in history. That, too, is a heck of an accomplishment. America, at the moment, is so tribal that it would rather believe than understand. Facts are the ants in our collective pants.

Peter: Just me, or is Trump way too hot tonight? I don't have a running tally of the number of times he's interrupted Clinton, or Holt, but it seems like it's gotta be pushing a dozen. And these aren't restrained interruptions: As I tweeted a moment ago, Trump is really wearing his anger and his contempt on his sleeve.

There were one or two occasions where I thought this might have worked to his benefit: expressing outrage over economic setbacks in Michigan and Detroit isn't a bad move, politically speaking—especially when Clinton missed a golden opportunity to do the same. Overall, though, I feel like we're watching the agitated, undisciplined Trump win out over the restrained, "presidential" candidate who's been on offer for the past few weeks.

Trump is HOT. There's nothing cool about him. Ever. Well, maybe in Mexico.

I think both Trump and Clinton are doing a good job of appealing to their core constituencies. The first 30 minutes of any televised debate are generally considered to be the most important, because the audience—even a big one like this—will tend to lose focus. So for both of them, so far so good.

As for substance, Clinton has more. Let's take taxes. Fox News, reporting information supplied by The Associated Press (hardly a lefty outfit), put the cost of Trump's tax plan as costing the nation in excess of $1 trillion. Here's the story. That's a big ouch. But it's a factual ouch. And facts are unpopular these days.

On trade, Trump effectively tapped into popular sentiment on both the left and the right.

Clinton, however, was more sophisticated. Classically Clintonesque. Her team no doubt applauded. His probably rolled their eyes.

What neither mentioned was agriculture. NAFTA has helped American farmers and has tended to hurt Mexican agriculture. It's a wonky point for sure, but an interesting one. NAFTA is going to be very hard to unravel. Every bit as daunting as Brexit will be for the U.K. I would like to have heard both of them talk about TPP, the pending Pacific trade deal.

But the dynamic duo were both at the top of their games.

Peter, I wanted to talk about Trump and Clinton going back and forth on race, but then Trump planted the image of a 400-pound hacker in my brain and I totally lost my rhythm. So bear with me. If memory serves, we just saw Trump blame birtherism on Clinton (again); say, essentially, that he was a more effective birther than Clinton was (again); and upbraid Clinton for her use of the term "superpredator." 

And now, somehow–I'm still not sure how we got from point A to point Z–Trump is complaining that no one calls Sean Hannity to confirm that he (Trump) actually opposed the Iraq War. And Clinton is shaking her body and smirking as Trump finishes talking up the glories of his temperament. And Trump is talking up Russia's expansion and military potency as a model to emulate, and telling the audience that Benjamin Netanyahu "is not a happy camper."

So tell me: What the hell happened here tonight? Usually I watch a debate and feel like there's a clear narrative arc. Tonight feels postmodern. Jarring. Un-summarizable. My somewhat dazed takeaway, as the evening grinds to a close, is that Trump's aforementioned rhetorical heat will lead to most people labeling Clinton the winner—if only because he interrupted Lester Holt at least a half dozen times over the course of the night. But I offer that assessment with a minimum of confidence. What a fever dream of a debate. 

People who paid attention learned a lot. The question is, did Clinton help herself? Or did Trump hurt himself? I think it depends on where you were sitting when you turned on the TV. My conclusion is that Trump failed to move the dial.