PSU Students Have All Eyes on Trump/Clinton Debate
PSU Students Have All Eyes on Trump/Clinton Debate
Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton stood at the same stage at the same time Monday night in the first Presidential debate of the general election, and Penn State was all eyes and ears on this hotly-anticipated encounter.
As part of PSU Votes Week, the Speech and Debate Society at Penn State held a debate watch party in the Flex Theater at the HUB-Robeson Center, and nearly every seat was full for the event. Debate Society President Neema Esfandi asked the audience questions prior to the debate, including what topics they expected would be covered.
“The enormous and blatant charity fraud of the Clinton foundation,” responded one student. Another student immediately raised his hand and said, “The enormous and blatant charity fraud of the Donald J. Trump foundation,” which received applause from many in the audience.
Once the debate began, oohs and clapping came from the audience regularly. Trump interrupted Clinton and debate moderator Lester Holt several times, and initially, the audience responded in surprise of the behavior, but soon reacted to the outbursts less as the night went on. The biggest reaction, however, was when the Republican nominee remarked, “I also have a better temperament than she has,” to which the audience gasped and laughed. One person even said in disbelief, “This is real life!”
The Speech and Debate Society were going to facilitate a post-debate discussion, but after the debate ended at around 10:40 p.m., almost all students in the theater exited the room. “We went to grab the mic and [once we] turned around, half the crowd was gone,” said J.A. Kurr, a coach for the debate society. “I think that the 90 minutes of nonstop debate got people tired,” he said.
Overall, Kurr said he doesn’t believe that the debate solidified anyone’s decision. He says many of the topics they addressed, including Trump’s “birther” comments and Clinton’s “super predators” statement was “just more energizing to their base.”
From a debate perspective, Kurr said the facilitation could have been better.
“I think the main problem is that the moderator let the debate get away from him. You need to interject more to keep the two candidates on track, and he didn’t,” Kurr said of Holt, who is the anchor of NBC Nightly News.
One student said he thought that Donald Trump was caught off guard.
“When he got into his main points of “Make America Great Again” [and] deportation, he was well articulated,” said Brian King, a freshman at Penn State majoring in nuclear engineering. “But when it came to newer, current events, like the whole birther thing, he was really jumbled,” he said.
Even with his takeaways from the first debate, King said he is still not fully decided. “When things were brought up about Hillary, there were some really good answers that Trump would have said, but he didn’t prepare,” King said. “He’s not a good debater.”
Chris Baker, communications director for student organization We Are for Trump, thought that “It was a sweep” for Trump. Baker says that Trump proved he was qualified simply by the fact that he was on stage for a presidential debate.
He did give credit to Hillary Clinton’s charge of Trump being “baited by a tweet.” Baker said that while Trump does indeed get in unproductive Twitter wars, “I don’t think it’s fair to compare a twitter war to nuclear war.”
The last question of the debate asked whether each candidate would recognize the result of the election. Clinton said that she would respect the will of the voters and urged as many people to vote. Trump responded by saying that he would “Make America Great Again” and ended with a shockingly bare statement, “If Hillary wins, I will absolutely support her.”
Baker was ecstatic about his statement.
“Hillary was talking about, ‘when others take the low road, we take the high road?’” he said, “Hillary Clinton took the low road, and Trump took the high road to end the debate!
Stay on the train!