Clinton won: here’s why

No-one likes to be wrong. No-one likes having their mistakes and contradictions pointed out in public. But everyone knows someone who just cannot let it go until they have shown how they were really right all along, no matter how convoluted or plain ridiculous their explanations become.

In a friend or colleague, this trait can be annoying — but for a politician it can be career ending. And for Donald Trump it cost him the first presidential debate.

Trump started the debate strongly. His positions on economics and trade may be largely nonsense, but Clinton’s are no less so and the lacklustre American economic recovery is a huge weakness for the Democrats.

With the moderator failing to protect Clinton from Trump’s interruptions, he rocked her with a dozen different denunciations every time she spoke, while a wooden Clinton wore a frozen smile of disbelief. At one point things got so bad for Clinton she deployed a pre-prepared line straight out of Bill Shorten’s Big Book of Zingers. ‘Trumped up, trickle down’ … How about ‘Hillary’s hoary old clichés’?

And then Trump just fell apart. It was like he simply had to respond to every quip, aside and claim Clinton made about his businesses, his past or his beliefs. Trump’s corrections and interjections invariably made things worse.

Part of Trump’s appeal is that he is not a politician, but the first skill a politician learns is how to shift the focus off topics they don’t want to talk about and on to those they do. Trump couldn’t or wouldn’t do that so he spent most of the debate fending off attacks on his past — so much so that he missed obvious opportunities to attack Clinton over her emails, the controversies over her foundation and her foreign policy failures. He barely mentioned his strongest area: immigration.

Trump’s stream of consciousness, word-salad approach to public speaking might work when speaking to big crowds, but in a debate format it often just made his answers incomprehensible.

Clinton’s performance was exactly what you would have expected — mediocre. Trump showed that he could beat her, but he also showed why he probably won’t.