7 minutes

The 7 minutes when Trump blew the third debate

The trouble began 30 minutes in.

By Shane Goldmacher

Rarely have seven minutes so encapsulated the complexity and the craziness of an entire presidential race, let alone this one. But they did on Wednesday night.

The stretch began with Donald Trump missing a golden opportunity, and yet still catching a crucial break. It included flashes of his crowd-pleasing charisma, and then his total lack of discipline. It demonstrated Hillary Clinton’s studied self-control, and his own penchant for self-sabotage. It began with her on the ropes. It ended with him flailing.

It came nearly 30 minutes into a final debate that had been, until then, a surprisingly sedate affair. There had been no outbursts or interruptions, only civil disagreements. And Trump was in the midst of prosecuting his case on immigration, one of his strongest suits.

“Under her plan you have open borders,” Trump said. “You would have a disaster on trade and you will have a disaster with your open borders.”

“What she doesn’t say…” Trump went on.

Clinton tried to elbow her way in. She could recognize the punchline he’d set up perfectly.

“What she doesn’t say,” Trump would surely go on to say, is that Clinton had told a Brazilian bank in a paid speech that she wanted “open trade and open borders.” She tried to keep the text of that speech secret, but it had been recently revealed in the WikiLeaks dump.

Except that’s not what Trump said. He didn’t bring up her speech at all.

But moderator Chris Wallace did. He recited Clinton’s $225,000 speaking fee. He read her words back to her. Wallace landed the punch Trump had pulled.

“Thank you,” Trump said.

The audience laughed.

Clinton then waded through 90 seconds and 219 words of a non-answer about what she’d really meant. And she shifted from the shaky ground of open borders to attacking WikiLeaks, and then to Russia and then to Vladimir Putin. “Will Donald Trump admit and condemn that the Russians are doing this?” she pushed.

Trump shook his head in disbelief as she spoke. He tilted in her direction and glared. He adjusted his microphone. His eyes narrowed. He pursed his lips. Then he pounced.

“That was a great pivot off the fact that she wants open borders. Okay?” Trump said. “How did we get onto Putin?”

It was the line of the night so far. The crowd laughed so loud that Wallace admonished them.

“So just to finish on the borders,” Trump went on, pinching his right index finger into his thumb and holding his hand up high.

He’d won the moment.

And he lost it.

He took the very Putin bait he had just openly mocked.

“So I just want to tell you she wants open borders. Now we can talk about Putin,” Trump digressed. It was a public demonstration of a flaw already familiar to his senior aides: his refusal to let any slight pass by unanswered. “I don't know Putin. He said nice things about me. If we got along well, that would be good.”

“Putin from everything I see has no respect for this person,” Trump said as he pointed at Clinton.

“Well, that's because he would rather have a puppet as president of the United States,” she snapped back.

“No puppet. No puppet. You’re the puppet. No, you’re the puppet,” Trump cat-called back as she took charge, laying out the case of Russia’s cyberattacks that Trump had encouraged.

He reached down for a drink of water. He glared again. He readjusted his microphone again. The topic was now Putin. The words “open borders” would not be uttered again all night.

Instead, Wallace would push Trump to condemn Russian interference in American elections. “Of course, I condemn, of course,” Trump said. He went off on another long Putin tangent. “I never met Putin. This is not my best friend.”

When Trump was done, Wallace reminded everyone where the conversation had begun.

“We're a long way away from immigration,” Wallace said.

And Trump was farther from victory than he’d been only minutes earlier.