What we learned from the Debate: Seven things about Donald Trump that haven’t changed

Sam Turnbaugh, Reporter

Trump still doesn’t care about facts and statistics.

From the beginning of the debate Donald Trump brushed off the moderator’s note that the US has experienced six straight years of job growth, insisting that “our jobs are fleeing the country” and falling back on his familiar trope that trade is hurting the US economy. It’s not the first time that Trump has created his own economic reality; in September he claimed that the unemployment rate at the time, 5.1% was “such a phony number” and instead estimated that unemployment was 42%, yes, he claimed that nearly half of the US working-age population was unemployed.

Trump is still very ambiguous as to how he will carry out his plans – or whether he has a plan at all.

How does Mr. Trump plan to put a stop to this (statistically unsubstantiated) job loss? Simply stop companies from going overseas. “So what I’m saying is, we can stop them from leaving. We have to stop them from leaving.” He said in the first few minutes of debate, and then proved unwilling to go into specifics on just how this would be managed. Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders proceeded to accuse Trump of hypocrisy on Twitter: “If Trump is concerned about companies going abroad maybe he should move his plants out of Bangladesh where workers are paid 30 cents an hour.”

When Clinton attacked Trump’s tax plans, citing an analysis which suggests that they would add a further $5 Trillion to the US debt, Trump countered with: “But you have no plan.”

“We have a very robust set of plans. And people have looked at both of our plans, have concluded that mine would create 10 million jobs and yours would lose us 3.5 million jobs, and explode the debt which would have a recession,” she replied.

Trump then attacked Clinton for posting her plan to defeat ISIS on her website; “Well, at least I have a plan to fight ISIS,” she retorted.

“See, you’re telling the enemy everything you want to do. No wonder you’ve been fighting — no wonder you’ve been fighting ISIS your entire adult life,” Trump exclaimed.

(Author’s note: ISIS came into being in 2013. Hillary Rodham Clinton was born in 1947.)

 

Trump is still proud of ripping people off. 

Hillary Clinton accused Donald Trump of cheering for the housing crisis which sparked the 2008 Recession in order to benefit his own financial interests. His response? “That’s called business, by the way.” Business indeed, the business of human suffering here in this country and around the world, as thousands faced job layoffs and evaporating savings as global financial markets were shaken to their core.

Further, Trump bragged “That makes me smart,” when Clinton accused him of paying no taxes,                 and suggesting that there “must be something really important, even terrible, that he’s trying to                 hide.”

Trump can’t deny his own past statements.

Clinton took another swipe at Trump when she said: “Donald thinks that climate change is a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese. I think it’s real.” Trump interjected: “I did not. I did not. I do not say that.”Well… about that…

@realDonaldTrump on Twitter: “The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.”

Beyond this memorable incident, Trump’s most memorable quote from the debate was certainly his one word answer when confronted about his record: “Wrong.” It seemed for the most part that Mr. Trump spent most of the debate forced to defend (or reject) his former actions and statements rather than confront Mrs. Clinton’s own record.

Trump is still not concerned if his proposals are unconstitutional or not.

Donald Trump’s signature anti-crime policy, Stop-and-Frisk, was declared unconstitutional in 2013, and moderator Lester Holt reminded him of this fact during the debate.“No, you’re wrong,” insisted Trump. But the key here is that it wouldn’t matter to him anyway, as evidenced by his proposed ban on Muslim immigration, his suppression of journalistic outlets, and his support for torture.

Trump still doesn’t understand technology.

Trump has never seemed to understand technology; during the Republican primary he said the following with regard to the internet: “We’re losing a lot of people because of the Internet. We have to see Bill Gates and a lot of different people that really understand what’s happening. We have to talk to them about, maybe in certain areas, closing that Internet up in some way.”Bill Gates is gonna close up that internet for us.

Things have not improved. Last night, when asked about cyber security and foreign hacking, Trump spoke at length on “The Cyber”: “As far as the cyber, I agree to parts of what Secretary Clinton said. We should be better than anybody else, and perhaps we’re not… We came in with the internet, we came up with the internet, and I think Secretary Clinton and myself would agree very much, when you look at what [the Islamic State] is doing with the internet, they’re beating us at our own game. ISIS.”

“We have to get very, very tough on cyber… We have so many things that we have to do better, Lester, and certainly cyber is one of them.”

Trump still does not understand the consequences of his foreign policy statements.

Supporters of former Secretary of State Clinton point to her experience in diplomacy and foreign policy as evidence of her suitability for office, while Donald Trump has pointed to failures during her tenure as evidence of the opposite; however, Trump’s own statements on foreign policy issues have been erratic and conflicting, from talk of disbanding NATO and pulling out of South Korea to targeting the families of foreign jihadists.During the debate Trump criticized Clinton for the nuclear deal with Iran; Clinton hit back with accusations that Trump lacked “the right temperament to be Commander-in-Chief,” arguing that his hot-headedness could be dangerous to the US internationally.

“The other day, I saw Donald saying that there were some Iranian sailors on a ship in the waters off of Iran, and they were taunting American sailors who were on a nearby ship. He said, you know, if they taunted our sailors, I’d blow them out of the water and start another war. That’s not good judgment.”

“That would not start a war.” Trump replied.

I don’t know about you, but I think that if Iran fired on a US Navy vessel, it very well might, in fact, start a war, and I think that the sentiment runs both ways.

Clinton then continued, criticizing Trump’s “cavalier attitude about nuclear weapons”, mentioning prior statements where he has advocated for Japan, Korea, and Saudi Arabia to develop nuclear arms.

“A man who can be provoked by a tweet should not have his fingers anywhere near the nuclear codes, as far as I think anyone with any sense about this should be concerned,” Mrs. Clinton concluded.