--- title: Presidential Debate: Hillary Clinton Played Defense description: Donald Trump forced Hillary Clinton to play defense throughout the second presidential debate. canonical: https://time.com/4524665/presidential-debate-donald-trump-hillary-clinton-defense/ author: Joe Klein article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2016-10-10T05:54:34.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-08-19T07:45:30.507Z article:section: Politics og:title: Trump Forced Clinton to Play Defense at the Debate og:description: But he didn't exactly win either. og:url: https://time.com/4524665/presidential-debate-donald-trump-hillary-clinton-defense/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt251b3a6558975ec0/6988a94c196cf4414c03d803/donald-trump-hillary-clinton-handshake.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 2560 og:image:height: 1440 og:image:alt: TIMEPOL og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Trump Forced Clinton to Play Defense at the Debate twitter:description: But he didn't exactly win either. twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt251b3a6558975ec0/6988a94c196cf4414c03d803/donald-trump-hillary-clinton-handshake.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # Donald Trump Forced Hillary Clinton to Play Defense at the Debate > Sponsored content. 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Brief is TIME's Washington newsletter, written by senior correspondent Philip Elliott. It explains the politics, personalities and power dynamics behind the headlines, three times a week. It reaches 85,000 subscribers with a 37.0% open rate as of August 2026. #### Where can I get analysis of Washington politics by email? D.C. Brief is TIME's free Washington politics newsletter, available at time.com/newsletters. It is written by a TIME senior correspondent who covers the capital full time. #### Who writes TIME's D.C. Brief? Philip Elliott, a senior correspondent at TIME, writes D.C. Brief. #### Is D.C. Brief free? Yes. D.C. Brief is free at time.com/newsletters. by [Joe Klein](https://time.com/author/joe-klein/) ## Joe Klein Oct 10, 2016 5:54 AM UTC  Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump shake hands at the end of the second presidential debate at Washington University in St. Louis on Oct. 9, 2016. Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump shake hands at the end of the second presidential debate at Washington University in St. Louis on Oct. 9, 2016.Robyn Beck—AFP/Getty Images by [Joe Klein](https://time.com/author/joe-klein/) ## Joe Klein Oct 10, 2016 5:54 AM UTC Well, we still have a campaign. Against all odds, against all pundits, against much of the leadership of the poor, poor Republican Party, Donald Trump breathes to bloviate another day. He will probably lose this election. I saw nothing in the second debate that might convince someone who _doesn’t_ think Hillary Clinton belongs in jail that she actually _does_ belong there. But Trump said she belongs there—which made Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh and perhaps a third of the American electorate very happy. More important, Trump didn’t say or do anything that resembled a final nail in his coffin. His eyes didn’t pinwheel, he didn’t splutter incomprehensibly, he didn’t lose his temper, he didn’t curse. He met and exceeded expectations for his performance, a bar that was no higher than a door sill. Did he win the debate? Perhaps—he did have Clinton on the defense throughout. He leveled so many lies and exaggerations and wild charges that she could not answer them all. His assertions about her emails, about the various unproven charges against Bill Clinton leveled by the poor women he assembled for a press conference, about Obamacare, about—well, you pick it—were outlandish, misleading and false. But here is the key to this debate and the Trump campaign: if the media set a low bar for Trump, he set an even lower bar for the American public. His constant refrain that Clinton had spent 30 years in public life and yet we still have all these problems—an unfair tax code, a faulty health insurance system, problems with immigration and terrorism, cancer, psoriasis—assumed that Clinton, all by her lonesome, was unable to do anything effective. Actually, that’s not fair: his real point was that politics as usual had not solved these problems. And our public has been trained, by a rating- and click-hungry media, to disdain politics as usual. (Let me plead guilty to being militantly in favor of a slow-moving, compromise-seeking, deliberative democracy.) Hillary Clinton’s problem in the second debate was the same as that of all Trump’s Republican opponents in the primary debates: it’s difficult to argue that we are not going to hell in a handbasket. When a demagogue says—ridiculously—that you should be in jail or you have “low energy” or that your father was complicit in the assassination of John F. Kennedy, there is no rational response. If you start to defend yourself—“Jail? Oh c’mon Donald”—you’re being defensive. And if you start to defend our country, you’re in a similar fix. The truth is, we’re in the midst of a historic, civilizational paradigm shift, from a national to a global economy, from the industrial age to the information age. We’ve had problems with the transition, but we’re doing pretty well compared to, well … every other country in the world. (Including Mexico and China, the countries that Trump claims are taking us to the cleaners.) It is difficult for even a very good politician to make that argument, and Hillary Clinton, as she demonstrated in the second debate, is not a very good politician. She is a barely competent politician. She did not lose any votes with her uninspired performance; her supporters and those who understand that Donald Trump is a poisonous threat to our democracy are still with her, which will probably be enough to win this election. She demonstrated, yet again, that she has a patient, presidential temperament. At times, when actual questions about policy were asked, she demonstrated an ability to answer them. But she let Trump get away with murder. I can’t remember a single sharp response, a single moment when she had him on defensive. Instead of responding to the _Access Hollywood_ tape by asking, “I’m curious, Don, what did Melania and Ivanka think of that little performance?”—she went off into the abstract, numbed down language about him being “unfit” for the presidency. We already knew that. It probably would have been better for her to say, “At a certain point, I’m just at a loss for words—and so I’ll let the _Access Hollywood_ tape, and your comments about Mexicans and Muslims, and all the other intolerable, un-American things you’ve said, speak for themselves.” If Trump proved he wasn’t dead, Clinton did not prove that she was quite alive—again, she was all about four-point plans not unifying visions. She didn’t speak directly to the Americans so alienated that they support this charlatan. And if the bar for Trump was ridiculously low, the bar for Clinton remains very high—even her supporters expect something more from her than sanity and competence. They expect her to say something that can carry us beyond this nightmare. They expect her to say something that puts the smallness of Trump and the greatness of America into context. That’s not easy, especially in a year when so many words, so much analysis and ugliness and theatrical extravagance has been put to such banal use. But transcendence, and finding a way to move forward is, by definition, the true definition of a leader. Lucky for her, we don’t need a particularly great leader right now—just someone who isn’t an ignorant, narcissistic, crude, bigoted liar. ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/4524665/presidential-debate-donald-trump-hillary-clinton-defense/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/4524665/presidential-debate-donald-trump-hillary-clinton-defense/"},"headline":"Donald Trump Forced Hillary Clinton to Play Defense at the Debate","datePublished":"2016-10-10T05:54:34.000Z","dateModified":"2026-08-19T07:45:30.507Z","description":"But he didn't exactly win either","url":"https://time.com/4524665/presidential-debate-donald-trump-hillary-clinton-defense/","keywords":["Debates","Hillary Clinton","2016 Election","Donald Trump"],"thumbnailUrl":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt251b3a6558975ec0/6988a94c196cf4414c03d803/donald-trump-hillary-clinton-handshake.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Joe Klein","jobTitle":null,"url":"https://time.com/author/joe-klein/"}],"articleSection":"Politics","image":[{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt251b3a6558975ec0/6988a94c196cf4414c03d803/donald-trump-hillary-clinton-handshake.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","width":1200,"height":675,"headline":"TIMEPOL","caption":"US Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton (R) and US Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump shake hands at the end of the second presidential debate at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, on October 9, 2016. / AFP PHOTO / Rob","creditText":"Robyn Beck—AFP/Getty Images","representativeOfPage":true}],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"/section/politics/","name":"Politics"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"item":{"@id":"/tag/debates/","name":"Debates"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/4524665/presidential-debate-donald-trump-hillary-clinton-defense/","name":"Donald Trump Forced Hillary Clinton to Play Defense at the Debate"}}]}] ```