Like what you read below? Sign up for HUFFPOST HILL and get a cheeky dose of political news every evening!
Headline writers spent the day generating synonyms for “undisciplined,” “rattled” and anything else polite-sounding to describe Donald Trump’s terrible first debate. Trump tried to put the disastrous evening behind him by paying a visit to Little Havana, which should not be confused with Bigly Havana. However, Trump only compounded his debate woes by attacking a beauty pageant winner, recalling Gerald Ford’s famous debate gaffe that there wasn’t any Soviet domination of Miss Universe. This is HUFFPOST HILL for Tuesday, September 27th, 2016:
ELIOT’S BOOK, THE BELTWAY BIBLE, IS OUT TODAY! - Our long national nightmare of Eliot constantly plugging his book will soon be over. In the meantime, order it online or buy it at any bookstore near you (including local D.C. institutions like Politics and Prose and Kramerbooks!). If you missed it, check out the excerpt in this Sunday’s Washington Post and Washingtonian’s interview with Eliot.
THAT DEBATE SURE WAS SOMETHING, BUT ALSO THE GOVERNMENT IS ABOUT TO SHUT DOWN - If we understood Donald Trump clearly last night ― and that was something of a challenge ― this is also Hillary Clinton’s fault. Matt Fuller, Jennifer Bendery and Michael McAuliff: “With the government set to run out of money in three days, the Senate failed to pass a government funding bill that Democrats oppose because it does nothing to help the residents still dealing with lead-poisoned water in Flint, Michigan. The Senate didn’t approve a procedural vote, 45-55, for the continuing resolution Tuesday. Several Republicans also objected to the bill that would fund the government only until Dec. 9, and 13 voted against moving the bill ― including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), which allows him the option to bring up the measure for another vote. The largest sticking point, however, appeared to be Republicans’ failure to deal with Flint’s lead crisis, even as they rushed to help flood victims in other states, especially Louisiana.” [HuffPost]
TRUMP NOT FEELING SO HOT AFTER TERRIBLE DEBATE - Donald Trump losing all the post-debate polls. Lost to Hillary. Sad! Daniel Marans: “Donald Trump accused NBC News’ Lester Holt of favoring Hillary Clinton in Monday night’s presidential debate. Steve Doocy, a co-host of Fox News’ ‘Fox and Friends,’ asked Trump in a phone interview on Tuesday morning whether the GOP nominee thought Holt ‘leaned a little bit over into the left lane’ to compensate for criticism that Holt’s colleague Matt Lauer endured for his moderation of NBC’s Commander-in-Chief Forum earlier this month. ‘Yeah totally. More than a little,’ Trump responded. ‘He leaned over to that lane.’ Trump’s critique was an abrupt reversal from his positive review of Holt in the post-debate spin room on Monday night, when he said he thought Holt ‘did a great job’ and his questions were ‘very fair.’” [HuffPost]
Side effects include shrunken hands, heightened blood pressure: “Donald Trump’s attack on a former Miss Universe pageant winner Tuesday morning proves that he suffers from a politically debilitating condition: Restless Trump Syndrome.... [I]n early August, Trump delivered an hour-long speech from a prompter, which many commentators hailed as some kind of ‘pivot.’ The next day? He speculated that maybe ‘Second Amendment people’ would kill Hillary Clinton if she became president, a comment that helped a bad news cycle spin faster as Trump’s poll numbers spiraled.... On Tuesday morning, Trump reverted to form when ‘Fox and Friends’ hosts brought up Clinton accusing him of bullying a former Miss Universe contestant for gaining weight. ‘She was the worst we ever had,’ Trump said of Alicia Machado, who won the pageant in 1996. ‘She was a winner, and she gained a massive amount of weight, and we had a real problem. We had a real problem with her.’” [HuffPost]
Folks are having a hard time defending some of Trump’s more contradictory statements, exchange via Sam Stein:
HUFFPOST: During the debate Donald Trump definitively said that he never once said that climate change is a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese. But here is a tweet where he says just that. [We attempt to show her the tweet.]
BLACKBURN: Well, I don’t have my glasses on.
HP: Come on! OK, I’ll read it. [We read it.]
BLACKBURN: Well, many times when we talk about issues related to the climate, y’all have countries that would not be forced to come into compliance with some of these agreements. Then they will say they don’t have to abide by that, they plan to buy more coal.
HP: Do you believe that climate change is a hoax?
BLACKBURN: I do not believe in climate change. I think the Earth is in a cooling trend. It is not in a warming trend. [HuffPost]
Like HuffPost Hill? Then order Eliot’s new book, The Beltway Bible: A Totally Serious A-Z Guide To Our No-Good, Corrupt, Incompetent, Terrible, Depressing, and Sometimes Hilarious Government
Does somebody keep forwarding you this newsletter? Get your own copy. It’s free! Sign up here. Send tips/stories/photos/events/fundraisers/job movement/juicy miscellanea to huffposthill@huffingtonpost.com. Follow us on Twitter - @HuffPostHill
GOP LAWMAKERS NOT TERRIBLY PLEASED WITH TRUMP’S DEBATE PERFORMANCE - Scott Wong: “GOP nominee Donald Trump was ill-prepared for Monday night’s debate. He missed opportunities to knock Democrat Hillary Clinton off her stride, especially concerning her private email server. And Trump came across as too defensive at times. That’s just some of what Republicans on Capitol Hill are saying about Trump’s performance at the first of three presidential debates. In fact, several congressional Republicans said they wished Trump had used a question he got on cybersecurity threats to aggressively attack Clinton’s use of a private email server while she was secretary of State.… ‘There is no better question to be able to pivot on when she completely failed on her own cybersecurity when she was secretary of State,’ added Rep. Rodney Davis (R-Ill.). Davis, who backed Trump after he won the nomination, said the businessman should have done a better job prosecuting foreign policy failures that occurred while her husband, Bill Clinton, was president and while she was running the State Department.” [The Hill]
@seungminkim: Debate reax from Senate Rs: Cornyn doesn’t want to talk about it, Hatch didn’t watch #debatenight
AT LEAST HE STILL HAS STORMFRONT - We can’t wait for Pepe the Frog to appear in the 2017 edition of “The Apprentice.” Ben Collins: “One of Donald Trump’s most ardent fringe message boards appeared to turn on its candidate of choice during Monday night’s debate, saying he ‘got played’ and that ‘this was not supposed to happen.’ 4chan, the alt-right forum that Trump and his campaign surrogates have mined for memes and image macros to repurpose on campaign Twitter accounts as recently as two weeks ago, devolved into arguments about whether the usually uniformly pro-Trump website had been overrun by ‘shills’ or if the candidate had simply lost the debate.... [S]ome users took time to attempt to game online polls soliciting opinions on who won the debate, imploring users to ‘abuse airplane mode toggling’ to allow for more votes for Trump on websites like CNBC, Time, ABC News, and CNN.” [Daily Beast]
TRUMP HATES ELECTRONICS ALMOST AS MUCH AS HE HATES DOGS - Someone needs to send the Donald to the classiest Radio Shack. Dana Liebelson: “Like carpenters, painters, cabinet-makers, lawyers, wives and women’s bodies, technology does not always live up to Trump’s expectations. ‘My microphone, in the room they couldn’t hear me, you know it was going on and off which isn’t exactly great,’ Trump said Tuesday after his first debate against Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. At that event, Trump said many words the American people needed to hear, like ‘the cyber.’ He also informed black and Hispanic people that they were ‘living in hell.’ Did someone sabotage his microphone?… The real estate mogul has had bad luck when it comes to audio equipment. Earlier this year, CNN asked him about a person named ‘former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke’ and a group called ‘white supremacists.’… Some people were upset that Trump did not initially say white supremacists were bad. That wasn’t his fault. ‘I’m sitting in a house in Florida with a very bad earpiece that they gave me, and you could hardly hear what he was saying,’ Trump said.” [HuffPost]
Thoughts and prayers to our own Travis Waldron: “Here’s what I discovered a few minutes into watching the first presidential debate of the 2016 election at the Benjamin, the bar and lounge in the lobby of the new Trump International Hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue: a special debate menu that included a $29 bowl of hummus named after Hillary Clinton, and an equally-priced plate of sliders covered in something called ‘smoked ketchup.’ A $100 offer to drink as many American beers as I pleased from 8 to 11 p.m. And a lot of people who wanted Donald Trump to become the next president of the United States.” [HuffPost]
PAUL LEPAGE SLIGHTLY UNTETHERED TO REALITY, IT WOULD APPEAR - God, what we wouldn’t pay for a transcripts of his thoughts during last night’s debate. Sam Levine: ‘Maine Gov. Paul LePage (R) could not have been more wrong when he said last month he had a personal binder proving that more than 90 percent of drug dealers arrested in the state ‘are black and Hispanic people’. Black and Latino people actually only made up 40 percent of those pictured in LePage’s binder, the newly released files show. LePage made the wildly inaccurate claims during an August town hall in which he said he had collected pictures of every single drug dealer arrested in Maine since January. His office released the binder on Monday after public records requests from The Huffington Post, several other outlets and the American Civil Liberties Union of Maine. He also claimed in August that people of color in his state were ‘the enemy’ because they made up the ‘overwhelming majority’ of those arrested for drug dealing.” [HuffPost]
Rudy Giuliani, too: “Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani called Hillary Clinton ‘too stupid’ to be president while defending Donald Trump as a ‘feminist.’... The remarks came following Monday night’s presidential debate, during which Clinton discussed working for the middle class while Trump bragged about not paying his taxes and sniffled a lot.… ‘And after being married to Bill Clinton for 20 years, if you didn’t know the moment Monica Lewinsky said that Bill Clinton violated her that she was telling the truth, then you’re too stupid to be president.’” [HuffPost’s Sebastian Murdock]
BECAUSE YOU’VE READ THIS FAR - Here’s a pet kangaroo.
COMFORT FOOD
- The first three-person baby was just born ― that’s right, it has three biological parents.
- A 1985 report on snowboarders and their ne’er-do-well ways.
- Michael Jackson’s “Black and White” performed on old computer hardware.
TWITTERAMA
@profmusgrave: I literally think Trump has never had to listen to a woman for this long in his life.
@Shteyngart: Imagine being Donald Trump’s tongue, waking up every morning and wondering if this is the day you’re going to swallow yourself and end it all
@morningloria: Kellyanne Conway is throwing up into a potted plant
Got something to add? Send tips/quotes/stories/photos/events/fundraisers/job movement/juicy miscellanea to Eliot Nelson (eliot@huffingtonpost.com) or Arthur Delaney (arthur@huffingtonpost.com).