Notes on First Clinton-Trump Debate

Key: C- Hillary Clinton ---- T - Donald Trump

The following are notes I took while watching and listening to the first debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, with some commentary to follow.

C - Build an economy that works for everyone - Fairer economy -- Raise minimum wage - Equal pay for equal work - Paid family leave.

T - Jobs are fleeing the country - No one in government to fight them - Mexico is building some of the biggest plants - Stop stolen jobs - Reduced taxes to 15% from 35%. - Renegotiate trade deals.

C - Coined "Trumped-up trickle-down." --- T - When Mexico sells to us there is no tax. - Thousands of companies are leaving.

C - Trump [essentially cheered] for the housing crisis by saying it was good for business, because he could pick up housing cheap and sell at a higher price. - Said climate change is a hoax by the Chinese. --- T -  Said he didn't say that about China.

T - Obama has doubled the debt. --- C - [Under Obama] increased exports by 30% and by 50% to China. T - Tax cuts would add 5 million jobs. - His tax cut is the biggest since Ronald Reagan. - Wealthy will create major jobs. - Taxes are so onerous. - Bureaucratic red tape prevents jobs from coming back. --- C - Trump's tax cuts will benefit the wealthy and Trump himself. --- T - Fed is not doing its job.

T - Will release tax returns as soon as Clinton releases her 33,000 e-mails. - Clinton's use of private e-mails was not a "mistake."

C - Trump didn't pay any income tax for some years. --- T - Not paying income tax makes him "smart." --- C - Trump has about $650 million of debt. --- T - Debt is well below $650 million.

T - We've become a third-world nation. - We're a debtor nation.

C - Trump stiffed an architect. --- T - Didn't pay the architect because maybe he didn't do a good job. - There are tens of thousands of [my workers] who are very satisfied. - Trump International is way under budget.

C - Need to face injustices in the criminal justice system. --- T - Clinton doesn't want to use the words "law and order." - In Chicago they have thousands of shootings. - "Stop-and-frisk" worked very well in New York. - Contradicted Lester Holt's statement that stop-and-frisk was ruled unconstitutional. - Relationship in Dallas [between police and community] was "very beautiful." --- C - Wants to end private prisons in the states. - Police must deal with a lot of mental problems.

T - Supports those on the no-fly list from buying guns. - African American community has been let down. - Clinton campaign started birther campaign, with Sidney Blumenthal as a leading player. - [He] did  a great job of getting Obama to produce his birth certificate.

C - Russia is hacking into a lot of organizations. --- T - Don't know if Russia is hacking.

T - Obama and Clinton created an oasis in Iraq. - "Had we taken the oil," ISIS would not have the support they have today. --- C - Brought up Trump's assaults on Muslims here and abroad. --- T - NATO is opening up  new terrorism division.

T - "I have a much better temperament than [Clinton.]."

T - Says nuclear weapons is the greatest threat -- not climate change, as both Obama and Clinton believe. - Russia is expanding its nuclear weapons capability. - Iran is one of North Korea's biggest trading partners. - Deal with Iran is one of the worst deals in history.

T - Hillary Clinton doesn't have the "looks" to be president. - "Stamina" was substituted for "looks." - Hillary has experience but it is bad experience. - Was going to tell an unpleasant story about the Clintons but wouldn't because Chelsea was there.

Comments on the above: Fact checkers were provided far more material to find false from Donald Trump than from Hillary Clinton; also, although both interrupted, Trump interrupted far more and with more aggressive body action.  Post-debate, Trump initially heaped praise on the moderator, but within twenty-four he was accusing Lester Holt of being biased toward Clinton. And, oh yes, he was given a defective mike that was maybe a deliberate act of sabotage.

I could do a laundry list of policies and proposals presented by Hillary Clinton that are both superior to, and better argued than those put forward by Donald Trump, but I will confine my comments to a selective few.

1.) Trump claimed that he never labeled climate change as a Chinese hoax; however, in the GOP presidential primaries, Trump said climate change was a Chinese hoax designed to cause U.S. companies to spend money on pollution control devices, thus making them less competitive in the world market.

2.) The claim that Trump's federal income tax plan will create five million jobs comes from a Tax Foundation assessment that the plan will increase the GDP and job growth. Both the Congressional Budget Office and the congressional Joint Committee on Taxation have concluded that these estimates of growth are much too rosy. It is also the case that the trickle-down concept on which the Trump plan is based, by which the tax cuts are heavily weighted to the benefit of wealthy tax filers, has never worked in the past. The period from the end of World War II to the late 1970s was one of unprecedented economic prosperity, and yet, the top marginal income tax rate was never under seventy percent.

3.) The architect that Hillary Clinton identified as being stiffed by Donald Trump is only one of many who have either not been paid or have been underpaid for their work . Newsweek magazine did a feature article on Polish workers who were underpaid by at least $100,000 for their work on Trump Tower. Trump never paid a cent toward redressing the underpayment, as the court judgment in a lawsuit fell on the middleman that Trump had hired to manage the workers.

3.) Regarding stop-and-frisk, when Donald Trump was asked how to remedy the toxic relationship between minority communities and law enforcement, he called for stop-and-frisk to be instituted nationwide. When a furor arose over this proposal, Trump said he only wanted it to be imposed in Chicago.

Donald Trump's claim that stop-and-frisk worked "incredibly well" in New York City, is belied by the fact that only in .02 of about five million stops was a firearm found. Minorities constituted a very high percentage of the stops and the police devoted a very high number of hours for a very little result.

4.) When Donald Trump accused President Obama and Hillary Clinton of creating ISIS by creating an "oasis" in Iraq, he overlooked the desire of most Iraqis to get U.S. troops out of their country and the troops actually left on a timetable worked out between the Iraqi government and President George W. Bush. The Iraqi government could never agree to giving immunity to U.S. troops from Iraqi law.

5.) Donald Trump initially said that Hillary Clinton didn't have the"looks" to be president; however, he changed it to "stamina," because he likely did not want to rekindle what he said and did in regard to Carly Fiorina and Ted Cruz's wife.

6.) I think that the most reprehensible thing Trump did in the debate was to say that he was prepared to say something very unpleasant about Bill and Hillary Clinton but wouldn't so as not to upset their daughter. Trump's surrogate Rudy Guliani then compounded this outrageous gambit by labeling it as a display of magnanimity on the part of Trump.

7.) Donald Trump took credit for NATO creating a terrorism division. A NATO spokesperson has said that NATO had begun developing a terrorism unit before Trump suggested it.

8.) Trump's claim that  his strongest quality was his temperament probably created the strongest negative reaction of anything he said. Those in a focus group in New Hampshire were reported to be aghast at hearing his claim.