This Post article is a big wrap-up of the night, noting specifically the Pubs that think Trump didn't do well.
What kind of weird world is it when conservative journalists are ranting against the GOP nominee. And further, when the Democratic nominee is Hilary Clinton. Truly remarkable.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/pow ... 019a1e037/
Some nuggets from the article:
- “It is hard to imagine that there was a single moment in the debate that would have convinced a wavering college-educated woman in the Philadelphia or Cincinnati suburbs to vote for Trump,” writes
Roll Call columnist Walter Shapiro.
- “Hillary was well-informed and unflappable; Trump got across his major themes but was probably too Trump to widen support,”
National Review executive editor Rich Lowry concludes.
- Peter Wehner, who has
served in three Republican administrations, said Trump “self-destructed” as he baldly lied about his opposition to the invasion. “Mr. Trump not only denied reality; he denied reality that was captured on tape, meaning it’s indisputable,” Wehner writes in the Times. “No matter. He lives in his own make believe world. [And] for Trump to then follow up his tirade by insisting that he has the right temperament to be president shows you how unbalanced he is. The unmasking continues.”
- “Even if you are a Trump supporter, you have to think that he left a lot on the table,” writes
GOP supper lobbyist Ed Rogers, a veteran of the Reagan and Bush 41 White Houses. “He didn’t see the openings and he didn’t swing at the softballs that came his way. He never used the word ‘change,’ he didn’t bore in on Hillary’s email scandal and he never got around to the Clinton Foundation and Hillary’s suspect integrity. Trump was inarticulate and rarely hit the bull’s eye.”
- “He was exciting but embarrassingly undisciplined,” writes
New York Post conservative columnist John Podhoretz. “He began with his strongest argument — that the political class represented by her has failed us and it’s time to look to a successful dealmaker for leadership — and kept to it pretty well for the first 20 minutes. Then due to the vanity and laziness that led him to think he could wing the most important 95 minutes of his life, he lost the thread of his argument, he lost control of his temper and he lost the perspective necessary to correct these mistakes as he went. By the end … Trump was reduced to a sputtering mess blathering about Rosie O’Donnell and about how he hasn’t yet said the mean things about Hillary that he is thinking.”
- “After the first 20 minutes, it may have been the most lopsided debate I’ve ever seen — and not because Clinton was particularly effective. But you don’t need to be good when your opponent is bad,” writes
National Review’s David French, who considered running for president as an independent. “Why didn’t he have a better answer ready for the birther nonsense? Has he still not done any homework on foreign policy? I felt like I was watching the political Titanic hit the iceberg, back up, and hit it again. Just for fun.”