I haven't seen it yet. Mainstream (left-wing, biased, Trotsky-ite, Marxist-Leninist, pinko) media gives it to Clinton. The Atlantic says Trump was punchy and unscripted, Clinton was thoroughly prepared and incisive. So nothing unexpected there because that is their respective styles.

There was a lot of media attention on Clinton's attack on Trump's treatment of women. That was obvious too and if Trump was going to prepare for anything, he should have had a defence for that. The transcript indicates that he did not.

Clinton took a fall on the email scandal admitting it was a mistake.

After all my years in public life I am sickened by the intellectual dishonesty, arrogance, and smugness of what Nassim Taleb calls the Intellectual Yet Idiots.

The IYI's showed up immediately after the debate.

They stacked the deck against Trump with Lester Holt's one-sided questions and interventions.

The Holt-Clinton team was glib, articulate, and self-congratulatory. However, they lost.

• Trump wins strategically because in a blunt, clear style, he is saying things most Americans believe. Trump's opponents, including Holt and Clinton, felt good after the debate because their side was glib, articulate, and said things they and their friends believe to be true.

The Intellectual Yet Idiot class that dominates our news media fell all over themselves critiquing Trump and praising Holt and Clinton.

In doing so, they repeated the mistake they have made about every debate since August 2015.



Trump wins strategically because in a blunt, clear style, he is saying things most Americans believe.

Trump's opponents, including Holt and Clinton, felt good after the debate because their side was glib, articulate, and said things they and their friends believe to be true.

The Intellectual Yet Idiot class is so out of touch with America that they don't even realize how badly they are doing and how well Trump is doing.

Salena Zito is one of the country’s most perceptive journalists, in part because she is grounded outside of Washington and New York. Her column about the debate, "How Trump Won Over a Bar of Undecideds and Democrats," should be required reading for everyone who wants to understand why Trump strategically won the debate.

This process of media elites and Washington insiders reassuring themselves that Trump lost while a variety of online polls showed him winning decisively has been going on since the very first Fox News debate in August 2015.

Trump has a hard time with media elites because they earn a living by talking. The media values glibness. In their world you can speak nonsense if you do it smoothly and convincingly.

Secretary Clinton is a professional politician. She has been campaigning as a volunteer, spouse, and candidate for 46 years (far longer than Trump suggested). She volunteered for Joe Lieberman's state senate race in 1970. She and Bill worked for George McGovern in Texas in 1972. Secretary Clinton is also a Yale-educated lawyer. She combines Ivy League polish and arrogance with verbal smoothness and four decades of political speak.

Trump is a blunt, let's-make-a-deal, let's-get-the-building-built, let's-sell-our-product businessman.

The first debate showcased a blunt, plain spoken businessman and a polished professional politician.

Of course the Intellectual Yet Idiot insiders would pick Hillary. They share her passion for words without meaning, analysis without facts, and promises without performance. They are more than for her. They are her.

In fact, it is worth looking at a list of online polls to understand the gap between the elites and the vast majority of Americans. This list is long because I want to show you how willfully out of touch and dishonest the Intellectual Yet Idiot class is:

Time: Trump 55 Clinton 45

Fortune: Trump 53, Clinton 47

N.J.com (New Jersey): Trump 57.5, Clinton 37.78

CNBC: Trump 68, Clinton 32

WCPO Cincinnati: Trump 57, Clinton 37

Variety: Trump 58.12, Clinton 41.88

Slate: Trump 55.18, Clinton 44.82

WKRN Nashville: Trump 64.58, Clinton 35.42

Las Vegas Sun: Trump 82, Clinton 18

Fox5 San Diego: Trump 61.45, Clinton 33.69

San Diego Tribune: Trump 65, Clinton 35

If you go to the Daily Mail, you can see that the list goes on and on.

Clinton won a handful of liberal sites with liberal audiences but she lost virtually everywhere else.

The elites can argue Trump does better in online surveys because his supporters are more energized, but that is a self-defeating analysis.

The lack of energy and enthusiasm for Clinton is a big problem for her.

In Iowa, the Democrats currently have one half the number of absentee ballots they’d received for Obama at this point in 2012. Polls in Iowa reflect a decisive Republican lead in a state Obama carried twice.

In Wisconsin, the Marquette University poll shows Clinton ahead by only 3 points.

In Minnesota, a poll which came out this week shows the race tied at 43-43.

If Clinton has to fight for Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, her campaign is in real trouble.

Trump is beginning to pull away and she has to stop the momentum.

On Monday night, she failed.

Trump won because he didn't make a major mistake and he stuck to the facts.

I was proudest of him at the very end.

Hillary was vicious, nasty, mean-spirited, and arrogant. Look again at those final minutes.

Hillary knew there was almost no time left and so she rattled off a memorized rant about Trump insulting women. The look on her face is smug.

You could see Trump thinking.

He was really mad at the end of the debate with her cheap shot.

His natural pattern in Republican debates would have been to humiliate her with all of Bill's accusers and her role as his defender and enabler.

It would have been powerful and ugly.

But he stopped. He thought, “This is not what a potential president would do, and I will not do it in front of Chelsea.” He responded as a president and not a candidate.

The media elite were thrilled that Hillary could be so mean and nasty.

The country will prefer a president with self-discipline and a sense of decency.

Trump is going to become president unless he makes a big mistake.

Clinton is going to lose again unless she turns the momentum around.

Monday night, Trump conveyed his core messages. He may have lost on glibness but he won on sincerity, empathy, and authenticity.

Not even remotely. The gentleness of the word "mistake" implies that she was somehow not cognizant of its implications. In reality, she circumvented any transparency pertaining to its use and then proceeded to cover up her tracks when she got caught. She seeks to encapsulate the weight of these offenses with lukewarm terminology so as to effectively neutralize them. She'll take a fall when she's dragged off to prison.

She was being fed lines. She's a zombie at this point. He didn't do great but it was his first real debate and did ok.

Mr. Trump made an extraordinary statement that he would appointed a special prosecutor to look into Mrs. Clinton's use of email as secretary of state before then declaring she belongs in jail. He dodged and weaved on tough questions about his crude remarks in 2005 — repeatedly calling it "locker room" talk.


Mrs. Clinton tried to stay above the fray but ended up getting dragged into some uncomfortable exchanges about her email usage as secretary of state and her husband's alleged infidelities and indiscretions.


Both candidates steadied themselves after a very rocky and uncomfortable start, even ending up a positive note with both candidates saying positive things about one another and shaking hands.

Imagine if someone with intellect, moral hygiene and GOP support was running. Someone who wasn't open to easy, easy shots about treatment of women, Putin, fucked-up business deals. Jeb Bush. McCain. Romney.

If there is any consolation for the Republicans, it is that in four years time unless Clinton does something quite remarkable in her first term, the GOP will have her number.

You're forgetting about the mainstream media. Aka "the Democrats' largest super pac."

The media demonized McCain as a senile old adulterer in 2008. In 2012 the demonized Romney as a animal abusing bully with fucked up business deals. Jeb would have been tarred as "W2.0" were he the nominee, while the media wrung its hands about how wrong family political dynasties are/

Oh come on. There's no comparison.

Clinton copes it for the family dynasty allegation, like Jeb. Clinton is also old, like McCain. The Clinton Foundation sounds analogous to a fucked-up business deal like Romney. Everyone in politics can whether these. They are all ordinary putdowns.

Trump is an intellectual featherweight with toilet-paper thin skin. How about the crack that The Celebrity Apprentice should have won the Emmys except that they were rigged? What a complete douchebag. Can you imagine McCain, Romney or Bush ever being such fucking idiots as to say anything like that?

Clearly, Trump is giving the media a lot of ammunition. That being said, even when the candidate isn't a guy like Trump, they demonize him with more or less the exact same attacks. Case in point, here's how the media portrayed centrist Romney in 2012:

• He is the worst major-party candidate in history.
  He’s a gaffe machine.
  He’s an evil racist who wants to return black people to slavery.
  He’s a brutal sexist who wants to return women to the subservience of the 1950s.
  He’s a nasty warmonger who doesn’t get the fundamental intricacies of modern foreign policy, with the Manichean worldview to match.

Similarly:

• liberals in 2012 claimed that Romney would be a “disaster” for women, that he and “capitalist extremists” wanted to “destroy America,” that, in the event of a Romney presidency, we’d “be at war and pretty soon there won’t be any more Medicare or Social Security plus the rich will keep getting richer and abortion will be illegal in most of the country.”
  
  President Barack Obama accused Romney of wanting to take the United States back to “policies more suited to the 1950s,” a not so subtle suggestion that a Romney presidency would subjugate women to inferior second-class status; the Obama campaign went so far as to imply that Romney’s policies would ruin women’s lives at every step of their lives. Joe Biden implied that Romney would re-enslave black Americans.

In fact, the minute that it looked like Trump might actually drop out, the libs started aiming their fire at Mike Pence, implying he was as bad, if not worse:

• When the leaked Trump audiotape was recently released, many people began to consider the possibility of getting Trump off the ticket and having Mike Pence — sane, normal grownup without a penchant for sexual assault — replace him as the Republican candidate for president.
  
  Not so fast: “Donald Trump is certainly terrible,” wrote Newsweek, “but Mike Pence may well be worse.” On Twitter, many were speculating along the same lines. “Having Pence in power,” according to Vox, “would be just as bad for women, if not worse, than Trump would be.”
  
  It’s one of the most ironclad rules of American politics: the next Republican is always the Worst Republican Ever. This tells us something rather poignant about liberal political philosophy — namely, that it exists less as a coherent and workable set of political and public-policy beliefs and more as a fanatical, oppositional vehicle for hysterics who shriek and faint whenever a new Republican walks onto the scene.