Breitbart's Alt-Reality Aside, Most Conservatives Agree: Trump Lost Bigly

Breitbart, the alt-right website whence came Donald Trump’s latest campaign guru, Steve Bannon, is today awash in alt-reality.

Drop in and you will learn that Donald Trump actually picked up more support following Monday night’s debate than did Hillary Clinton; that moderator Lester Holt “lived down to the worst expectations of conservatives” by diving into the tank on Clinton’s behalf; and that Clinton’s shimmy following a particularly unhinged Trump soliloquy went on just a bit too long, “getting awkward toward the end.”

In fact, as most people who watched the debate have concluded, Clinton defeated Trump decisively. To offer just one data point, an instant poll by CNN/ORC showed that viewers thought Clinton won by the lopsided margin of 62 percent to 27 percent. I thought Trump’s bullying, interrupting, scowling, and lying added up to the worst presidential debate performance I’ve seen—and I’ve seen just about all of them starting with Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford in 1976.

Commentators on the reality-based right have a very different take on Monday night’s proceedings than does Breitbart. At National Review, for instance, Jim Geraghty calls the debate “a terrible night for Donald Trump” beneath the headline “If This Night Doesn’t Save Hillary’s Campaign, Nothing Will.”

The news pages of the Wall Street Journal include a report that Trump’s performance may drive undecided voters into the Clinton camp . The Journal's notoriously right-wing editorial page, meanwhile, opines that Clinton “won on debating points,” and that Trump “made the case for change, but in a blunderbuss fashion that will have voters wondering if he knows enough for the job.”

I could go on—noting, for example, that the conservative Weekly Standard right now features headlines such as “Trump Choked” (by William Kristol) and “Trump the Loser” (by Fred Barnes). Or that the Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin, a leading anti-Trump conservative, writes , “Trump needed to conceal his temper, avoid queries on his taxes and dalliance with birtherism, and appear ready to be president. He didn’t.”

And I could cite a few exceptions to the conservative consensus—such as former Mitt Romney campaign manager Eric Fehrnstrom, who writes in the Boston Globe that Clinton’s good-but-not-great performance will not be enough to stop Trump’s rise.

Overall, though, you get the idea. Moderate and liberal commentators are convinced that Clinton won big—and, for the most part, so do conservatives.

Will it matter? I think it will. Before the debate, the polls had tightened considerably—but services that analyze polls, such as FiveThirtyEight , the New York Times’s “Upshot”   site, and PollyVote , were still pointing toward a narrow Clinton victory. The debate should stop Trump’s momentum, though it’s unlikely that Clinton’s big August lead is coming back.

Particularly noteworthy, I thought, was moderator Lester Holt of NBC News, who did about as good a job of keeping things moving as I’ve seen. The key was that he let Clinton and Trump go at it without cutting them off; I knew he was doing well when folks on Twitter started complaining that he must have left the hall. But Holt also interjected himself into the proceedings at a few important moments, holding Trump to account on his lies about where President Obama was born and his false claim that he can’t release his tax returns because he’s being audited. All in all, it was a masterful performance.

Not so masterful were Holt’s NBC colleague Chuck Todd and former Vermont governor Howard Dean, both of whom stepped in it on Twitter—Todd by flatly stating that Clinton had spent too much time in the study hall when she should have been out drinking or something, and Dean by insinuating without evidence that Trump was on drugs.

Based on past performance, I imagine we’ll be dealing with the fallout from Trump’s defeat for at least the next few days. For instance, Trump showed up on Fox and Friends this morning and made the curious decision to fat-shame the Miss Universe contestant Clinton mentioned at the debate, saying she “gained a massive amount of weight and it was a real problem.” Of course, this is his pattern: lashing out when he feels threatened, and especially when his nemesis is a woman.

I’d say that Clinton won ugly, but with Trump there is no other way to win. Faced with a normal opponent, she might have offered a bit more uplift and more of a positive vision. But she did what she had to do.