Did Donald Trump just threaten on the national debate stage to throw Hillary Clinton into jail if he’s elected president?
Let’s go to the transcript:
“Because you’d be in jail.”
Yep. Did it. Went there.
And this, folks, is precisely where Trump lost the debate, right at the moment where he clearly had Clinton on the ropes.
Clinton was struggling, to say the least, to come up with a coherent answer on the deleted emails that have been the focus of so many Republican congressional investigations, reduced to saying there was “no evidence” of any wrongdoing, a tone-deaf lawyer answer that somehow was the best her debate-prep team was able to come up with, in the face of many better answers.
To wit, the Bush administration “losing” 22 million emails, millions of them related to the disastrous foray into Iraq. Or Mitt Romney, on his way out of office as governor of Massachusetts, cleansing both email and paper records from being available for later public disclosure.
Nobody is calling for special prosecutors in either of those cases. No political hay was raised in the 2011-2012 campaign cycle by Romney’s Republican rivals or by President Obama.
But this is Hillary Clinton. She’s not George W. Bush or Mitt Romney.
She could point this out, but, nope, she went the “no evidence” route, then clumsily told people watching the debate to go to HillaryClinton.com to see what her fact-checkers had to say.
Which is to say, she was searching for a life vest.
Odd that Trump was the one to throw it to her.
“I’ll tell you what, I didn’t think I’d say this, and I’m going to say it and hate to say it,” Trump started. “If I win, I’m going to instruct the attorney general to get a special prosecutor to look into your situation because there’s never been so many lies, so much deception.”
“It’s just awfully good that someone with the temperament of Donald Trump is not in charge of the law of our country,” Clinton said, baiting a hook in hopes that Trump would let his temper do the talking.
“Because you’d be in jail,” Trump chortled back, predictably, and the headlines from the debate were etched in stone from here.
The rest of it: semantics
Sure, he threw running mate Mike Pence under the bus for what he said on Syria and Russia at last week’s vice presidential debate, and he himself stumbled badly, as one would expect, trying to deflect from the questions about the Access Hollywood video, but the Pence issue is one that would tend to go over the heads of most voters, and the video … is the video. He wasn’t going to win on that, no matter what he said.
He was about to punt the Clinton candidacy across the stage on the email issue, which she has handled so much better … basically everywhere, most notably last year in that 11-hour marathon testimony in front of Congress and the nation.
Trump, being Trump, stepped on his junk to deliver the line that was no doubt a highlight of his debate prep.
The last hour, give or take, of the debate was contentious, but largely on issues of policy, which while we all as high-minded folks claim to want a policy debate, we really don’t. Seriously, what are the relative ratings of C-SPAN and Jerry Springer, right?
CNN and YouGov offered the scientific polls in the late night declaring a Clinton debate win. It wasn’t the knockout that you might have presumed was coming on the heels of the Access Hollywood controversy, but think about it: did Clinton really want a knockout?
The answer: no
As much as Trump has defiantly asserted that he will not drop out of the race in the wake of the Access Hollywood video controversy, one more disaster on live TV on Sunday night, and he might have had no choice.
As evidenced by the mass departure of Republican endorsements over the weekend, the bulk of the right is just waiting to be able to write off Trump in favor of Pence, and let’s be clear about this: the strategy may very well be the only hope for the GOP to not only win the White House, but maintain control of Congress, at the least the Senate.
A Trump departure almost certainly leads to an immediate stand-down from millions of Democrats uneasy about Clinton, but energized to vote mainly to keep Trump from any proximity to the nuclear codes.
Clinton won the debate, but it was far from a knockout. Trump is still with us, to the detriment of Republican candidates down ticket.
And we get one more of these crapshows.
Yippee.
Analysis by Chris Graham
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