Donald Trump Missed His Chance In The First Debate

From Dick Morris.com (Sept. 28):

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump showed what an amateur he is in his first presidential debate performance Monday night. He stupidly thought a debate was about answering all the questions, rather than using them as excuses to get out his pre-planned sound bites. He lost the debate, but not by so much that he can’t come back in the second contest that will take place on Oct. 9th.

Apart from the outcome, the real story of the debate is the shots Trump left on the cutting-room floor. How can you go through a 98-minute debate with Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and not mention the following words: “Clinton Library,” “Benghazi,” “FBI,” “pay for play,” “IRS scandal” or “speaking fees”?

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When the subject turned to cyber-security, why on earth did Trump not talk about Clinton’s private email server and how it compromised America’s national security by putting the country’s innermost secrets on an insecure server in her basement? Instead, he let her ramble on about the danger of cyber-attacks. Claiming that Russian President Vladimir Putin was behind the hacking of the Democratic National Committee server, she warned the Russian leader against any more hacking before the election.

And when the host, Jim Holt of NBC News, asked Trump directly what could be done to ward off things like the terrorist bombings in New York, he didn’t even mention his proposal to ban immigrants from countries deemed to be state sponsors of terrorism. (The bomber was an immigrant from Afghanistan, one of the countries from which Trump would have barred immigration.)

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Trump also was unable to fend off attacks on his failure to release his income tax returns. Instead, he tried to sell the transparent falsehood that he didn’t dare release them while he was under an audit from the Internal Revenue Service — a position Clinton rightly debunked. And he had no answer to charges that he laid off workers, stiffed them of their pay and went into bankruptcy to avoid paying his debts. Trump should have turned to Clinton and said that he was a private businessman, and that sometimes he succeeded and sometimes he failed, while she has lived off the taxpayers for 40 years, never taking chances and never taking risks.

Trump’s biggest omission was his failure to challenge his opponent on her health. Apart from questioning her stamina (which Clinton rebutted well), he should have demanded that she take a full MRI exam and release the results to the public. We can handle a disabled president. We had one for 12 years (FDR) and did just fine. But we cannot have a demented one. And, after cranial blood clots and four fainting episodes in the past six years (that we know about), we are entitled to question her health and demand answers. But Trump let that pass him by, too.  [read more]

Yea, Trump should have definitely brought up her mental health. That’s actually more important than IRS records. If a president can’t think clearly under pressure then that could bring disastrous results to the country.

I agree with Dick Morris. Trump should have counter-punched or zinged Hillary more than he did. Trump should have used the word “deplorable” every once in a while. He could have asked the audience how many of them are deplorable. Or saying that Hillary lying to the mothers of the four Americans who died in Benghazi is what is really depolorable.

Hopefully, Trump will do better in the next debate. He needs to prepare more. If he is counting on the moderators to bring up Benghazi, Clinton’s mental state, the emails, etc. he shouldn’t hold his breath especially they are in the camp for Clinton. He has to do it.