When youre implying that your opponent has somehow wronged you by preparing for a debate, you know things are desperate.
When you're implying that your opponent has somehow wronged you by preparing for a debate, you know things are desperate. Krassotkin, Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons

"I think Donald just criticized me for preparing for this debate," said Hillary Clinton coolly, during her her first presidential debate with Donald Trump. "And I did."

She didn't say it in smug way, but in a detached, slightly satisfied, observational way. Maybe she knew at that point that she was winning, as Donald Trump descended further into incoherent babble.

Almost from the very beginning of tonight's debate, it was clear that Trump couldn't keep himself from grabbing all of the bait Clinton put out for him. And she did come prepared, offering policy ideas on everything from closing private prisons to preventing gun violence, and ready to dig into Trump's record of racism, sexism, and tax (transparency) evasion.

Meanwhile, Trump pouted. He simpered. While Clinton smiled, laughed, and urged viewers to visit her fact-checking site to be updated throughout the debate, he came off as angry and shrill. He frowned. He pursed his lips as if taking an angry duckface selfie. He clung to his rhetoric of fear, and spewed garbled nonsense masquerading as policy. Perhaps strangest of all, he sniffed. Really. Repeatedly. It was enough to spur Howard Dean to make a cocaine joke on Twitter:


In case you missed it—or if you just want to relive the horror—here are some real things Donald Trump did during tonight's debate, that Hillary Clinton, to her immense credit, did not laugh at:

• When asked about responding to police violence, Donald Trump advocated for reinstating stop and frisk, despite both Clinton and moderator Lester Holt telling him it was unconstitutional.

• When pressed on why he hasn't released his tax returns, he repeated the line about being under audit. The one that doesn't hold up.

• He said that not paying taxes made him "smart."

• Like a child trying to explain who knocked the lamp over, Trump said maybe the DNC hack was perpetrated by "someone weighing 400 pounds lying on their bed."

• When Clinton referred to his multiple bankruptcies, he responded by dismissively saying, "It's all words," as if words don't carry meaning, as if "bankruptcy" doesn't have a concrete definition.

• When Clinton called out Trump's well-documented sexism, he responded by saying that Rosie O'Donnell deserved it.

• Mid-meltdown, Trump claimed to have "a winning temperament." This was met by actual laughter from the audience.

When you're implying that your opponent has somehow wronged you by preparing for a debate, you know things are desperate. But I also think we may have located Trump's Achilles heel tonight. He didn't fail miserably just because Hillary Clinton is a boss at laying out policy plans (although she is) or that tonight's moderator at least had the good sense to say that yes, stop and frisk policies are unconstitutional (although he did; moderators do have an actual job, Matt Lauer).


It's that Clinton has spent her entire career taking abuse from men like Trump—being told that her ideas are no good, her record is shoddy, that she isn't the right kind of woman, that she's unlikeable, that she's [fill in sexist insult of choice]. Like so many women, Clinton has perfected a certain distance, a coolness, that has allowed her to carry on her political career in the face of outrageous misogyny, cruel media narratives, and some pretty objectively bad odds. It was a beautiful thing to watch her smile quietly, even cunningly, through Trump's tirades, armed with her notes, ready to "Well, actually" the most unworthy opponent we could come up with for her. She kept her cool, then went in for the kill, with zingers like "Words matter when you run for president," "Well Donald, I know you live in your own reality," and that immortal line about debate prep.

She's used to this, I thought. She knows not to take the bait. She's learned the hard way. She's done this before.

You can tell he hasn't.