What a study in contrasts the first presidential debate provided. Those 90 minutes encapsulated what Americans have seen from Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump on the campaign trail during these months that have felt like years.
Hillary Clinton talks about what she has done. She talks about her work to help people, those without power or money.
She speaks about other people, about their life experiences, what she’s learned of their challenges from listening to them — and her plans to improve their circumstances. Clinton lifts others up.
Trump talks about himself. He congratulates himself on his money, his self-described successes, his business dealings, his physical attributes, his pride in lobbing insults.
He tells us he’s smart because he doesn’t pay federal taxes — without thinking for a second that everyone watching him, all us little people, most certainly pay ours.
But I saw something new Monday night.
Uninformed in his answers, unable to stick to demonstrable facts about his own record, disjointed in his statements — that was just Donald Trump being Donald Trump.
But with each interruption of Clinton’s complete sentences, each refusal to wait his turn to speak, each scrunched up face, each “Wrong!”, each insistence that he get the last word, each self-compliment, each denigration of America, here’s what I saw in Trump: an insecure man.
I saw desperation and a lack of control when facing a calm, intelligent and poised opponent — an opponent who is a woman.
Clinton is confident. She is knowledegable. She is presidential. She doesn’t need to tell us she’s a leader, because she’s demonstrated it from the ground up her entire adult life.
The biggest bullies I’ve known are also some of the most insecure people I’ve met.
They have a compulsion to talk about themselves in glowing terms, to make sure everyone else knows how strong, smart and superior they are at anything and everything. They prime their own compliment pump to make sure it never runs dry.
Such preening is meant to come off to the rest of us as self-assuredness, of ultimate confidence. But the person in need of the sales job is the bully, not the audience.
Hillary Clinton doesn’t need to use a barrage of superlatives to describe herself, because she has real, verified successes that she measures in lives improved, not dollars collected or people shorted.
She has earned her confidence by knowing what she’s talking about — a quality I, and millions of other Americans, find essential in a president.
A vain and insecure man with an insatiable need for external validation and ego feeding is a person I cannot trust with the future of our country.
