Washington: Donald Trump must have left Long Island's Hofstra University a confused man on Monday night – he had dispatched 16 challengers for the Republican presidential nomination, most of them men – but pitted against that Clinton woman in the first of three presidential debates, none of his old tricks worked.
After an opening 30 minutes in which Trump performed strongly and noisily on jobs and trade, he suddenly found that Democrat Hillary Clinton was in control of the spectacle – with debate moderator Lester Holt retreating to the shadows and pretty much leaving the two candidates to go for each other.
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2016 presidential debate: Clinton versus Trump
Presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump trade blows in the first of three presidential debates.
Working their way through the entrails of the Iraq war, his tax affairs and her private email server, his alleged racist tendencies and her alleged gender shortcomings, they slugged it out for 90 ad-free minutes.
In the end, those calling it a win for Clinton included The Washington Post, The New York Times and Fortune magazine – along with dozens of boldface political and analytical names culled from the Twittersphere by Fox News, including The Atlantic's Ron Fournier, who tweeted: "Donald Trump lost his cool and maybe the race, taking bait coolly served by Hillary Clinton."
Apart from the opening session, Trump rarely seemed comfortable. He seemed unable to articulate a sensible response to a moderator's question on his support for the birther movement, the objective of which was to delegitimise the Obama presidency.
By contrast, Clinton turned the question to her advantage – tying it back to an early controversy in Trump's life over refusing to lease apartments to African Americans, before she branded him as racist.
Trump's response to questions about his sexist comments about Clinton served to make her responses resonate – "this is a man who has called women pigs, slobs and dogs, and someone who has said that pregnancy is an inconvenience to employers, who has said women don't deserve equal pay unless they do as good a job as men," she parried.
There were heaped expectations in both camps going into the debate. But at bottom, what Clinton needed to prove was that she'd not curl up and die, politically, as the rest of the field seeking the GOP nomination had done in the face of Trump's mockery, belittling and abuse.
![Trump wilted when his words were used against him.](/web/20160929150122im_/http://www.watoday.com.au/content/dam/images/g/r/p/o/4/e/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.grprdl.png/1474990696652.jpg)
Other expectations were relegated, including widening voter support at a time when opinion polls have tightened to the point of these two being in a neck-and- neck contest.
Polling in the coming days will reveal their respective success with would-be voters. But did Trump lose any supporters? And editorial in The New York Times thought no – "…anything short of dropping his pants in the Hofstra University auditorium would still have left him with the support of a large portion of the American electorate."