“Donald was one of the people who rooted for the housing crisis,” Hillary Clinton said during the Presidential debate last night, on Long Island. “He said, back in 2006, ‘Gee, I hope it does collapse, because then I can go in and buy some and make some money.’ Well, it did collapse.” At this, Trump interjected, “That’s called business, by the way.”
What does Donald Trump call business? His livelihood is the rationale for his candidacy—“that the basic function of the government is deals. And you need a president who can do deals. And he has a record of doing deals,” as Michael Kinsley put it—and yet his particular idea of business had not, until last night, been discussed much during this campaign season. His Republican adversaries in the primaries had spent careers celebrating the virtues of capitalism; during the general election, some rigorous early scrutiny of his finances faded when it became obvious that, even if he wasn’t as rich as he claimed, he was still very rich. Last night, Clinton, with Trump’s help, sharpened the portrait of Trump the plutocrat. “The wealthy are going to create tremendous jobs,” Trump insisted, in trying to explain why tax cuts for the richest Americans would be good for those who had been left behind. The billionaire acknowledged that in some years he had not paid taxes, and said that, even if he had, “it would be squandered.” Hillary Clinton won this debate in many ways, but her attack on his ways of doing business cut the deepest: she Romneyed him.
It was obvious from the start that this would be one of Clinton’s aims. As my colleague John Cassidy has noted, she came with a practiced phrase for his economic plan, “Trumped-up trickle-down" economics, and, if the delivery was less than smooth—the first time she deployed it she had to pause, as if trying to recall the formulation—the charge was effective. Clinton raised the same material that her campaign had built a devastating Web ad around, that Trump’s companies routinely stiffed their small business suppliers, and said there was an architect in the audience who had been victimized in this way. “Maybe he didn’t do a good job, and I was unsatisfied with his work,” Trump said. When Clinton said that Trump’s career had been jump-started by a fourteen-million-dollar loan from his father, Trump called the amount “small” but didn’t challenge the sum. He called the six hundred and fifty million dollars he owed to banks “really not a lot of money.” He kept naming cities where he owned property, as if this meant he owned the cities themselves. He bragged about opening a private club in Palm Beach (“a tough community”) that included African-Americans and Latinos, as if that insulated him against all charges of racism. He seemed basically resistant to the notion that he had some obligation to contribute to the public good. The two years' worth of Trump tax returns on the public record, Clinton noted, showed that he had not paid any taxes at all.
“That makes me smart,” Trump said.
When George W. Bush (“the M.B.A. President”) and Mitt Romney ran on their business records, the proposition was that business provided a theory of how the world worked and how executives ought to behave. Last night, Trump offered no theory of business beyond his insistence that his deals would be better. He made himself an advertisement for capital accumulation rather than capitalism; it was deals all the way down. At times the businessman persona still had some power: when Trump bragged that his Washington, D.C., hotel project was coming in under budget and ahead of schedule, the undecided voters in Frank Luntz’s Philadelphia focus group gave the mogul high ratings. But the accumulated cruelty of his business career also invited a rebuke, that for his entire adult life he had been out only for himself. “True story - my Dad's company was stiffed by Trump on a six figure telecom job in the 1980's. Trump told them it would cost more to sue him,” Brian Walsh, the Republican consultant and former spokesman for the Republican National Senatorial Committee, tweeted.
In a maelstrom you can only batten so many hatches, but Trump's assertions that Clinton let slide were themselves telling. Some of the darkness that has gathered around Trump’s campaign has to do with his naked racism and misogyny, his summoning of mean and truculent old ghosts. But some of it has to do, more simply, with the country he describes, in which people in inner cities are “living in hell,” in which jobs are being ushered out at the border and terrorists in. Trump assembled these images last night, insisting that jobs were declining, that NAFTA had emptied the manufacturing sector in the Upper Midwest, that crime was historically high. None of these particulars is true, but Clinton mostly let the picture stand. This was a strange circumstance in which the country described in the Presidential debate was far more anguished and victimized than the real one. Maybe Clinton had just decided to concentrate her efforts elsewhere, or maybe she made a tactical decision not to let herself be tied to the status quo.
Surely Trump will try to do so in their next debate, on October 9th, in St. Louis, after what is likely to be the most overshadowed Vice-Presidential debate in modern memory. At least until then, a certain image of Donald Trump has become clearer. Democrats have not always known how to handle the Republican candidate, a nativist who attacks them on trade from the left. One gift of this debate to Clinton’s party is that he now looks like a much more familiar target: a rich guy who is out for himself.
_Read more about the first debate: John Cassidy on Donald Trump's self-inflicted errors, Amy Davidson on how Trump failed to bully Clinton, and Jill Lepore on how Presidential debates have evolved on television.
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