How Monday night's debate became a clash of caricatures

Trump the blowhard vs. Hillary the nerd

The blowhard vs. the nerd.
(Image credit: Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

In Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, we have two of the oldest people to ever run for the presidency. And people of a certain age do tend to become caricatures of themselves. In this debate Trump was too much of a blowhard. And Hillary Clinton was too nerdy.

In the last hour especially, the former reality TV star would ramble in his Trumpian way: asides within asides, wrapped in a parenthetical, and punctuated by a non sequitur. At one point he congratulated himself on his restraint for not saying something nasty he could have said about the Clintons. (Pssst: It's about Bill Clinton's tomcatting). At another, he criticized Clinton for her lack of stamina, even though his body language and baggy diction indicated that it was he who was flagging. And worst of all, he rambled through a response on racial issues by half-heartedly bragging about owning a golf club that minorities can join.

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Michael Brendan Dougherty

Michael Brendan Dougherty is senior correspondent at TheWeek.com. He is the founder and editor of The Slurve, a newsletter about baseball. His work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, ESPN Magazine, Slate and The American Conservative.