NEW YORK — He claimed she would raise taxes and accused her of supporting open border policies that would allow an influx of unchecked migrants into the country. He blamed her for a litany of failures of the current administration and portrayed her potential presidency as four more years of the same.
Donald Trump did not face the vice president Kamala Harris. It was Hillary Clinton on the debate stage.
As Trump and Harris prepare to debate for the first (and possibly only) time on Tuesday, his three meetings with Clinton in 2016 illustrate the challenges both candidates face in what appears to be another extremely close election.
Harris will be going up against a skilled and experienced debater who excels at shaking up his rivals with a barrage of insults and interruptions, while projecting an unwavering confidence and conviction. And Trump will be going up against a prosecutor who has a long history of throwing punches. He will once again be going up against a woman who would become the nation’s first female president, and must navigate the underlying gender dynamics at play.
During their first 2016 debate in late September, moderated by NBC’s Lester Holt, Trump began on his best behavior. He and Clinton shook hands warmly after taking the stage, and Trump said in his first answer that he agreed with his rival on the importance of affordable child care.
After referring to the former first lady, senator and secretary of state as “Secretary Clinton,” he checked to see if she approved the proposal.
“Yeah? Is that okay? Good. I want you to be very happy. That’s very important to me,” he said, drawing laughter from the audience and Clinton herself. (In later debates, he called her “Hillary,” while she consistently used “Donald.”)
It was Clinton who delivered the first criticism of the evening when she slammed the then-reality TV star and real estate developer for supporting “trickle-down” economics, saying their different perspectives stemmed from the fact that Trump millions of dollars from his wealthy fatherwhile hers had been working hard printing curtains.
In the audience, she said, was an employee who accused Trump of defrauding him of bills.
As the debate progressed, Trump became more combative, asking Clinton why she had not done the things she proposed as a presidential candidate during her decades in public life.
“Typical politician: all talk, no action. Sounds good, doesn’t work. Never going to happen,” he said.
Clinton’s strategy in response to Trump’s attacks was clear from the start: Don’t get upset. Laugh it off.
She never seemed nervous and instead smiled broadly as she dismissed what she saw at one point as Trump “saying more crazy things.”
“No wonder you’ve been fighting ISIS your entire adult life,” Trump joked at one point as he tried to portray Clinton as an “all talk, no action” politician from the group founded in 2013.
“I feel like at the end of the night I get blamed for everything that ever happened,” Clinton replied with a smile.
“Why not?” Trump replied.
Meanwhile, Trump tried to use the arguments she used against him against her.
“I have a much better judgment than they do…. I also have a much better temperament than they do,” he said. “I think my greatest asset — perhaps by far — is my temperament. I have a winning temperament.”
The second debate between Trump and Clinton was much more combative. The town hall took place just two days after the release of the “Access Hollywood” tape, in which Trump bragged about sexually assaulting women.
With his campaign in free fall and leading Republicans urging him to drop out of the race, Trump invited women who have accused the former president of Bill ClintonHillary Clinton’s husband, for sexual misconduct, which caused a spectacle as the women in the audience sat in the debate hall and spoke at a press conference before the debates.
This time, there was no handshake and the debate quickly descended into recriminations, with Trump insisting that what former President Clinton had done was “far worse” than his self-described “locker room talk.”
“Bill Clinton was abusive to women. Hillary Clinton attacked those same women and attacked them in a vicious way,” he said. “I think it’s outrageous and I think she should be ashamed of herself.”
Trump later focused on the thousands of hacked emails that WikiLeaks began publishing on the day the tape was released, and on Clinton’s use of a personal email server during her time as secretary of state.
As Clinton sat on her stool, Trump walked over to her and said that if he won, he would direct his attorney general to hire a special prosecutor to investigate her conduct.
“There’s never been so much lying, so much deceit,” he said. “There’s never been anything like this. … Lives have been ruined because you did 1/5 of what you did, and that’s a disgrace.”
Clinton was again undeterred, referring viewers to her website, where she said her campaign had fact-checked his false allegations.
“It’s just incredibly good that someone with Donald Trump’s temperament is not the boss of the law in our country,” she said.
“Because you would end up in jail,” Trump replied to cheers from the crowd.
In addition to encapsulating the sheer meanness of the race, the debate, moderated by ABC’s Martha Raddatz and CNN’s Anderson Cooper, also highlighted the gender dynamics at play. Trump, who is physically much larger, sometimes lurked behind Clinton.
As she apologized for using a private email server, Trump loomed menacingly behind Clinton.
During a subsequent question about the Affordable Care Act and rising health care costs, Trump stood directly behind Clinton as she stepped forward to respond to the audience member who had asked the question. The scene was immortalized in endless memes and parodies and has often been held up as a cautionary tale for male candidates debating women.
“‘This is not okay,’ I thought,” Clinton later wrote in a memoir describing the episode. She said that, on the small stage, “he followed me closely wherever I went, staring at me and making funny faces. It was incredibly uncomfortable. He was literally breathing down my neck. My skin was crawling.”
“It was one of those moments where you wish you could press pause and ask everyone watching, ‘Now, what would you do?’ Do you stay calm, keep smiling, and carry on as if he’s not repeatedly invading your space? Or do you turn around, look him in the eye, and say loud and clear, ‘Back off, creep, get away from me, I know you love to intimidate women, but you can’t intimidate me, so back off.’”
“I chose option A,” she said, “helped by a lifetime of dealing with difficult men who tried to distract me.”
“I wonder,” she continued, “if I chose option B. It would have been better TV, anyway.”
During the third debate, moderated by Fox News’ Chris Wallace, allegations of Russian election interference dominated the news.
“We’ve never had a foreign government try to interfere in our elections,” Clinton said. She expressed outrage that Trump had encouraged spying on Americans and accused him of touting Russian President Vladimir Putin’s line in exchange for help.
“She has no idea if it’s Russia, China or somebody else. She has no idea,” Trump replied, contradicting the conclusions of a long list of U.S. intelligence agencies. He insisted he did not know Putin, whom he mockingly said had no respect for Clinton.
“Well, that’s because he prefers to have a puppet as president of the United States,” Clinton replied.
“No puppet, no puppet. You are the puppet,” Trump shot back.
(Trump later said he condemned election interference “by Russia or anyone.”)
Clinton, in an interview with The New York Timesreferred to the “doll” moment as an example of what she hoped Harris would do on stage Tuesday night.
“She just shouldn’t be baited. She should bait him. He can get upset. He doesn’t know how to respond to substantial, direct attacks,” she told the outlet. “I mean, when I said he was a Russian puppet and he just stuttered on stage, I think that’s an example of how you put a fact about him out there that really upsets him.”
But the debate also provided a clear example of why Trump is such an effective debater. While Clinton tried to stay above the fray and laugh off attacks, Trump seemed in control, frequently interrupting him with jokes and commentary.
He also used split-screen, keeping the camera focused on both candidates’ faces for much of the debate, often looking straight ahead, radiating strength and visibly reacting.
At one point, when Clinton was speaking about her experiences, he interrupted her: “Give me a chance.”
“Wrong,” he replied, after she accused him of imitating a disabled reporter.
“Wrong,” he said again after she mentioned his previous support for the invasion of Iraq.
He repeatedly tried to control the proceedings, to complement Wallace or provide direction. After being asked by a long list of women about allegations of sexual assault, Trump insisted the stories were nothing more than “lies” and “fiction” and then tried to deflect by switching to Clinton’s emails.
“What’s not fictionalized is her emails,” he said. “That’s what you should be talking about. Not fiction.”
Clinton later lashed out at Trump when she discussed her plan to raise taxes on the wealthy to prop up Social Security.
“My contribution to Social Security will go up, and Donald’s will go up too, assuming he can’t figure out how to get out of it,” she said.
“What a filthy woman,” he said, shaking his head.
The debates also showed how little has changed over the past eight years.
During the third debate, Trump was asked for the second time about his attempts to cast doubt on the integrity of the election and his claims that it was rigged. Would he commit to accepting the results, he was asked?
“I will look into it at that time,” he said, complaining that a dishonest media was trying to “poison the minds of voters” and falsely claiming that millions of people were registered to vote when they should not have been.
He also criticized Clinton’s candidacy, just as he had done with Harris after she replaced Biden as the Democratic presidential nominee.
“She shouldn’t be running. She’s guilty of a very, very serious crime,” he said.
He was again asked whether he would commit to a peaceful transfer of power.
“What I’m saying is that I’ll tell you at that time,” he replied. “I’ll keep you in suspense.”
Clinton called his response “terrible,” noting that he claims there is always manipulation when something doesn’t go Trump’s way — from the Iowa caucuses that year to the loss at the Emmy Awards.
“Should have gotten it,” Trump said, prompting a laugh.
“That’s not how our democracy works,” Clinton insisted.