Her performance of restraint was more powerful than his performance of a cartoon mob boss.
Her performance of restraint was more powerful than his performance of brute strength. Krista Kennell / Shutterstock.com

It's hard to talk about who "won" last night's Town Hall debate at Washington University. To say definitely that Trump won or Clinton won assumes a shared reality. In the reality where 2+2=4 (most of the time), where the sky is blue (most of the time), and where a person wins a presidential debate if she wins the most arguments in the time allotted to her, then Hillary Clinton OBVIOUSLY won the debate.

David Leonhard's piece on the number of times Trump lied during the debate in the Times this morning provides twenty good reasons to believe that.

Recaps: The first presidential debate, the vice presidential debate, and the second presidential debate.

But, though he got in a few convincing zingers, Trump didn't even do that well in the WWF hyperreality of low-information voters who think a presidential debate is just another show on TV.

As many have pointed out, Donald Trump's losing in a number of key states (PA, NC(!), FL(!!), MI, CO, NV, IA, OH). In order to do better in those states, Trump needs to win over undecided voters, especially white, suburban women who haven't been paying much attention to the presidential election. Did he say or do anything last night to court or offend those voters?

He didn't walk onstage and piss on a toddler, but he did try to humiliate Hillary Clinton for the better part of half a day, and that was not a good look.

Before the debate even started, Trump held a press conference with four women who have accused Bill Clinton of sexual crimes. Afterwards, his campaign called Hillary Clinton an "enabler" of those alleged crimes and framed the stunt as evidence of Trump's support for women.

But he's clearly not a champion of women, and certainly not of those women in particular. Back when Paula Jones was telling her story, for instance, Trump called her a "loser."

Also: these women's stories are very old and very public. If Trump was really moved by them, he'd have been screaming about them for the last year and a half. But he hasn't been. Obviously he's only using these women as a shield to deflect attention away from that time he bragged about having enough star power to sexually assault women. The move is purely political and completely transparent.

But Trump's cheap attacks didn't end there. During the debate, he stalked Hillary Clinton around the stage like a sloppy uncle about to pounce on a bridesmaid. He called her "the Devil." He also said we would order his dreamworld attorney general to send a special prosecutor after Clinton to investigate "her situation." He also threatened to throw Clinton in jail, thus living up to an Infowars T-shirt many of his supporters wear. That threat isn't going over well with federal prosecutors, btw. (And speaking of Infowars, he did give Alex Jones a full blown, desk-shattering madgasm when recounting the stories of Bill Clinton's accusers, but Jones represents a demographic of conspiracy theorists who have a hard time achieving erection. Their numbers, thankfully, aren't high enough to secure a win for Trump.)

But did any of that sway the opinions of St. Louis's "uncommitted" voters? The room clapped and screamed after he went off on Bill. They clapped and screamed when she said she'd go high. They were watching a prize-fight. They were rooting for the punches. They like that the game is close. A close game is their favorite narrative, that's the best TV.

When he wasn't attacking Clinton, Trump was lying quickly and often in a tumble of disconnected sentence fragments, complimenting dictators on their strength and strong judgement, deflecting questions about his sexual misconduct by repeating the words "ISIS" and "locker room talk" so often that they began to lose meaning, and complaining that Clinton was getting more time to speak than him (despite the fact that he actually was given more time). He literally huffed and puffed. No matter how much they like a good TV show, it's really hard to believe that white, suburban women could have watched this performance and NOT seen Trump as a petulant child trying to worm his way out of a punishment.

Clinton, on the other hand, gave relatively substantive answers to questions about health care and foreign policy, looked directly at the people in the audience who asked her questions, and took the high road when Trump went low. The brilliance of her performance rested in the words she didn't say, in the things she didn't do. A blonde monster stood onstage and accused her husband of raping people, threatened to jail her, and tried to physically intimidate her for 90 minutes. And she shook his hand at the end of the debate? Now THAT is a performance. And that ability to stay cool, calm, and collected under a barrage of personal and political attacks is a habit of mind I like to see in a president.