Welcome to our first post-debate day roundup of Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign. There's a fairly good possibility there won't be another, so this may have been it for us. We’ll just have to see.
Obviously, today's Donald J. Trump news was all about last night's debate. To most observers, Trump did not do well; what's not yet clear is whether it will matter. Anyone currently voting for Donald Trump surely knows at this point that he is an obnoxious, self-satisfied boor with the policy ideas of a steakhouse menu; anyone among the serious Republicans who have been predicting Trump will at some point shift from his vapid belligerence to something more presidentialish have already proven themselves gullible beyond redemption. So we have what we have: Donald Trump plays to his base with an apparently unironic reality show imitation of a very loud and not very bright politician, and we all wait to see what percentage of America thinks so little of self-governance that they reckon that cartoonish version is good enough.
That's the abstract version. Here's the specifics.
• With a viewership of more than 80 million people, last night's debate was the most-watched presidential debate ever.
• Since the punditry is obsessed with the "optics" of each debate, let's get the "optics" out of the way; Trump was not on his best behavior last evening, but he was certainly at his most Trumpian, repeatedly interrupting both Clinton and the moderator. It was also perhaps bad "optics" for a man obsessed over his opponent's supposed poor health to show up to a debate while clearly sick and sniffling, but candidates can't control getting sick on the campaign trail so we won't hold that against him.
• What can be held against him, however, is both his obvious lack of preparation and his irrepressible hot-headedness when faced with even the smallest Clinton jabs. His best moments were repeating standard stump talking points using his indoor voice; his worst moments were everything after that.
• So who won? According to post debate polling, Clinton. According to the pundits, Clinton. According to Republican talking points guru Frank Luntz, Clinton. According to the fact checkers—actually, we haven't heard from the fact checkers since late last evening. Somebody should probably check in on them to make sure they're all right.
• Debate catastrophe No. 1 for Trump: A disastrous response to Clinton's evidence of Trump's contemptible treatment of women around him. Faced with 80 million people learning that he called a Latina beauty contestant "Miss Housekeeping" and mocked her for gaining weight by calling her "Miss Piggy," Trump could merely sputter. On this morning's Fox & Friends, however, he defended and repeated his attacks, calling the Miss Universe winner, Alicia Machado, "the worst we've ever had" because "she gained a massive amount of weight, and we had a real problem."
• Trump debate catastrophe No. 2: Clinton's reference to the thousands of people who Donald Trump hasn't paid over his career, including multiple individuals Clinton said she herself met with, with a dismissive assertion that that's what a smart businessman does: "Maybe he didn't do a good job and I was unsatisfied with his work." There's not a contractor or small businessman in America who's not been stiffed by a larger company or wealthy client looking to shave a few dollars at someone else's expense, and Trump is perilously close to becoming poster child for the practice.
• Trump debate catastrophe No. 3: Getting "birtherism" hung around his neck before a national audience. While Trump bragged that he did "a great service not only for the country, but even for the president," with his campaign doubting the sitting president's American citizenship, Clinton tied it to charges of racism from Trump's own company. Trump's responses likely satisfied his own base, but at the expense of further reminding those viewers infuriated by Trump's dog whistles just how unrepentant he is. Also doing damage: Trump's constant depiction of black Americans as living in hellholes and in need of a whole lot more "law and order."
• Trump debate catastrophe No. 4: When Clinton speculated that alleged billionaire Donald Trump might be paying zero income taxes, based on the few returns that have been made public in which he indeed was shown to have paid zero in income taxes. Trump's response? "That makes me smart." We'll be seeing that in an ad. While Trump denied saying it in a post-debate interview—perhaps not aware the debate had been televised?—Clinton continued the attack today: "He probably hasn't paid a penny to support our troops or our vets or our schools or our healthcare systems."
• Most memorable fact check of the night: Trump's denial of Clinton's claim that Trump called climate change a "hoax perpetrated by the Chinese." It took fact-checkers only minutes to identify the exact tweet in which Donald Trump said that: It was from November 6, 2012. The rest of Trump's actual policy proposals were similarly peppered with false claims. That would be, however, the only mention of our rapidly heating climate.
• Most contentious fact check of the night: When moderator Lester Holt pointed out that "stop-and-frisk" was ruled unconstitutional in New York, Trump declared him wrong. Holt was in fact correct.
• Most bizarre fact check of the night: Trump's demand that those who doubt his false insistence that he was against the Iraq War "call Sean Hannity. I had numerous conversations with Sean Hannity at Fox." Those Americans still not wholly convinced of the noble honesty of Sean Hannity must, alas, continue to search elsewhere. A concerted non-Hannity-centric Fox News push to come to Trump's aid was also met with skepticism.
• According to one fact checker, Trump's debate performance featured roughly one lie every two-and-a-half minutes.
• In response to Trump's repeated post-debate threats to go after Hillary Clinton's personal life and unsubtle references to Monica Lewinsky, Clinton told reporters "he can run his campaign however he chooses." It's difficult to imagine any scenario in which such attacks would endear Trump to voters, and it's all but certain the Clinton campaign has already honed responses to those attacks, so we can interpret Clinton's "however he chooses" response as an unsubtle dare.
• But enough about Donald Trump, what do Trump's fellow Republicans think of Donald Trump? House Speaker Paul Ryan seems to be having profound memory problems of late, first praising Trump's debate performance in a news conference but then, when asked about Trump's defense of his "Miss Piggy" remarks, claiming he didn't see that bit. It took John Boehner years and the House's best-stocked liquor cabinet to develop a memory that selective; no word on how Paul Ryan has managed it so quickly.
• President Obama was distinctly unimpressed with Trump's performance.
• Trump surrogate Rudy Giuliani says Trump might skip the next debate. "The moderator would have to promise that there would be a moderator and not a fact checker."
• Pro-Trump users from Reddit and the troll haven 4chan "bombarded around 70" online polls with repeated votes in order to skew them towards declaring Trump the debate winner. This is primarily notable because nobody with an IQ above bread takes such polls seriously, but it was still enough to attract Trump's attention.
• In one of the few bits of other news to survive the debate-day onslaught, Washington Post reporter David Fahrenthold continues his one-man crusade to figure out just what the Donald J. Trump Foundation does. His latest reports are causing speculation over whether the charity group is or is not primarily a rather straightforward tax dodge.
