The
Debate in One Scary Answer
Gail Collins
Gail Collins OCT.
19, 2016
O.K., Donald Trump
won’t promise to accept the results of the election. That’s truly
… good grief.
“I will tell you
at the time. … I’ll keep you in suspense,” he told Wednesday’s
debate moderator, Chris Wallace. The word “rigged” came up. Yow.
Hillary Clinton
noted that Trump tends to presume that whenever he loses anything,
the system was rigged: “There was even a time when he didn’t get
an Emmy for his TV program three years in a row and he started
tweeting that the Emmys were rigged.”
“I should have
gotten it,” Trump retorted.
This is obviously
what we should have known was coming when the host of “The
Celebrity Apprentice” wound up as a presidential nominee. But
jeepers, people, this is serious. Trump was refusing to acknowledge
it was even possible for him to lose a fair fight. At one point, he
announced the election was rigged because Hillary Clinton was in it.
(“She should never have been allowed to run for the presidency
based on what she did with emails.”)
The rigged-election
moment overshadowed everything else in the debate, during which Trump
made very strange faces while Clinton was talking, but did manage to
avoid going completely off the rails. Does that make him a success?
We are once again faced with the problem of the very, very low bar.
Still, no.
He did manage,
particularly in the early part of the debate, to ignore Clinton’s
effort to get his goat. When she claimed he “choked” at his
meeting with the president of Mexico, he kept pretty calm. Although
Trump did observe, weirdly, that when it came to immigration, under
President Obama “millions of people have been moved out of this
country. … She doesn’t want to say that, but that’s what’s
happened … big league.” Is moving people out not the whole Trump
plan?
They also had a
whopping argument about — guess who? Vladimir Putin! “Putin from
everything I see has no respect for this person,” Trump said,
referring to Clinton. The fight went on for a while, until she
cannily managed to divert the discussion to the possibility of
placing Trump’s “finger on the nuclear button.”
O.K., two critical
takeaways. Trump won’t promise to concede if he loses, and if he
wins, he gets control of the nukes. These are the only things you
need to think about for the next two and a half weeks.
We have been down
this debate road before, and we knew before the evening started that
when Trump was asked about groping women, he’d deny everything,
blame it on Hillary Clinton and then bring up the emails. And that
when the emails came up, Clinton would mention the way Trump insulted
John McCain’s war record, the Mexican-American judge and the
parents of the dead war hero.
“Such a nasty
woman,” Trump said at one point. As the debate went on, he got more
sullen, his expressions stranger. One of the things we have now
learned for sure, three debates running, is that he has a serious
stamina problem. Hillary Clinton has many faults. She tends to give
long, rather boring answers. She has never learned how to deal with
the email question. But the woman is an absolute rock in these
long-running, high-stress critical encounters.
Also, she made it
very clear that she would accept the results of the election, even if
she lost. God help us all.
Clinton was not
particularly good in defending the Clinton Foundation. However, it
did seem fair for her to point out that Trump used some of his own
foundation’s money to purchase a six-foot portrait of himself.
(“Who does that?”)
But what difference
did it all make? The man wouldn’t promise to concede if he loses.
Later on CNN, his campaign manager said Trump would indeed accept the
results “because he’s going to win the election.” This was not
particularly reassuring.
If you were totally
ignoring the entire event, you might want to know that nobody shook
hands, that it took Clinton an hour to mention that Trump had never
released his tax returns, and that whenever she pointed out that he
had purchased the very same Chinese steel and aluminum he complained
was ruining the economy, he said that it was her fault for not
changing the laws.
She did bring up the
Miss-Universe-is-fat moment, and Trump said “give me a break.”
He promised to run
the country “the way I run my company,” and a great part of the
listening public contemplated the fact that this is a guy who’s
declared bankruptcy six times. But we’ve already forgotten all
about it.
Only one thing
matters. The man says he won’t promise to accept the results of the
election. All those establishment Republicans who’ve been hoping to
get through this ordeal by just being quiet and looking sad have got
some work to do. Fast.
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