Clinton Could Have Corrected Trump, but He Blared ‘Wrong!’

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/27/us/politics/assertions-hofstra-debate.html

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It did not come from the moderator, Lester Holt of NBC, or from Hillary Clinton. Often the closest thing to fact-checking to occur during Monday’s presidential debate was the low, blaring honk of Donald J. Trump’s voice: “Wrong!”

And that would have to suffice for anyone hoping for a rigorous, real-time examination of what was true and what was not. In that sense, the debate seemed a lot like the presidential campaign itself: largely devoid of a way for voters to know who was sticking to the facts.

Time after time, Mrs. Clinton passed up the opportunity to correct Mr. Trump on his misstatements and his frequent stretching of the truth. Mr. Trump offered only curt interjections when he felt she was exaggerating. And Mr. Holt, no doubt mindful of the mangled attempt by Candy Crowley, the former CNN anchor, to correct Mitt Romney during a debate in 2012, often sat passively by.

In a typical exchange, Mrs. Clinton tried to refute Mr. Trump as he boasted of how he would have the greatest tax plan since Ronald Reagan. “That can’t be left to stand,” she said. “I kind of assumed there would be a lot of these charges and claims.”

But Mr. Trump quickly cut her off. “Facts,” he said. The conversation quickly moved on.

But it is Mr. Trump who has had the looser relationship with facts over the course of the campaign.

Mr. Trump’s presidential aspirations were built on the lack of trust that many Americans felt toward the institutions that are meant to keep the country safe and strong. And wherever he could, he sought to undermine that trust further.

Our leaders do not just have the wrong ideas, they are “weak” and “stupid.” Our country is not just in decline, it is in a sorry, sad state. “We’ve become a third-world country,” he said at one point on Monday. “A war-torn country,” he offered later on, describing violence in the country.

There were times he made up his own facts. And Mrs. Clinton did not take the opportunities she had to prove him wrong.

She could have corrected Mr. Trump after he interrupted her to falsely claim that she was inaccurate in saying that murders in New York City were down.

“You’re wrong. You’re wrong,” he said. “Murders are up.” In fact, they are down 4.3 percent for the year, according to the New York Police Department. She let it stand.

He sowed doubts often by spreading misinformation, especially when his political fortunes were at stake. In April he denounced the entire primary system as “a phony deal” and “rigged” as he started to lose ground to Senator Ted Cruz in the Republican nominating contest. And after picking a fight with the family of a fallen Muslim soldier left him at his lowest point in the general election so far, he insisted that the election would be stolen by voters who were casting fraudulent ballots.

Mr. Trump’s remarkable ability to deflect questions about his character has been one of his most successful messaging feats. When under assault, he simply flips the script and brands his opponents as the liars and frauds.

He flipped the script again on Monday night, taking the issue of his temperament — which voters say overwhelmingly concerns them — and attempting to project those attributes onto Mrs. Clinton. Then he claimed his temperament was superior.

“I have a much better temperament than she does,” adding that it was probably his strongest asset.

This kind of smear politics often takes a toll on the practitioner. But Mr. Trump has proved far more immune than other candidates.

For better and worse, people know what they think of Mr. Trump. And any new information they are able to absorb only reaffirms how they see him – whether with delight or disgust.

Mrs. Clinton has her own problems with likability. But despite Mr. Trump’s recent improvement in some national and swing state polls, his unpopularity has remained stable and high. The Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll has consistently found large majorities of voters who say they have negative feelings about him. Sixty-one percent did this month. And since December of last year that figure has remained largely unchanged, hovering between 58 percent and 65 percent.

But while he claimed his faults as qualities, she seemed at times on Monday night to be hyperaware of the flaws that voters see in her. Perhaps nervous that viewers would find her nagging or hectoring, she missed some obvious chances to call Mr. Trump out on his errors.

At one point Mr. Trump tried to criticize her judgment on foreign policy, saying, “No wonder you’ve been fighting ISIS your entire adult life.”

Mrs. Clinton looked puzzled but did not make what would have been an obvious correction: That the United States started battling ISIS only after she left office as secretary of state. Instead, she implored others to correct him, “The fact checkers, please,” she said.

Toward the end of the debate the exchange turned to the Iraq war, the subject of one of Mr. Trump’s most frequent misrepresentations. He tried to explain himself, asserting that he had given an ambiguous answer when Howard Stern asked him in 2002 if he agreed the United States should invade Iraq.

“I said, ‘I don’t know,’” he claimed — falsely. (He actually said, “Yeah, I guess so.”) Seemingly aware that he was stretching the truth, he slyly added a caveat. “Essentially.”