On Sunday, October 9, the second presidential debate took place at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. The two presidential candidates, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, met for the second time and it was definitely something else to watch. This debate was in a town hall format, where members of the audience and citizens at home could ask questions to the candidates.This style of debate is meant to resemble the old Colonial American town hall meetings. The questions could be on any topic, as long as it pertains to the policy of the candidates, or even pertaining to the candidates personally. All of these questions come from citizens that are uncommitted on who they're going to vote for. These questions are meant to help these citizens gain a better understanding of the candidates so they can make a decision on who they'd like to vote for when Election Day rolls around.
This presidential debate Sunday was kicked off by a question from an audience member that asked the candidates if they believed they were modeling appropriate behavior for the youth of today. Clinton had the first opportunity to answer and did a good job in actually answering the question at hand. Then Trump had his turn to answer the question. Trump started off by agreeing with what Hillary had said, but then he went off on a rabbit trail and began talking about things that were irrelevant to the question asked. Once Trump finished his response, the topic went to the video that went viral of Trump saying vulgar and inappropriate things regarding woman. The video was from an incident that took place in 2005. The moderators gave Trump an opportunity to respond to the video. I felt that Trump didn't do too good of a job in defending himself, especially calling it, "just locker room banter." Clinton's response to this was that Trump was a bad man and was unfit to be the President of the United States. The debate would just keep spiraling on about the character of Trump and his past. Also during this back and forth from the candidates, Trump was getting a bit upset at the bias that he believed the moderators had for Clinton. This would be a common theme throughout the debate. The moderator is supposed to be unbiased towards the candidates, but it seemed that Cooper and Radiate were more in favor of Clinton.
The belief of this is because they wouldn't stop or interrupt Hillary when she would go past her given two minutes, but every time Trump would, there'd be immediate interruption by the moderators. Trump would call them out on this on multiple occasions. In my opinion, the moderators did seem to be a bit biased towards Hillary but didn't do anything blatantly obvious to handicap Trump or favor Clinton. The rest of the debate was filled with questions involving healthcare, Muslims in America, taxes, attacks on Aleppo, the Supreme Court vacancy, and energy policy. Clinton was able to answer the questions that were presented to her, while Trump was spotty. He would begin to answer the questions and then switch gears to another issue that doesn’t pertain to the asked question.
There was so much that happened in this debate and so much more we can learn from these candidates. I hope that everyone reading this and Americans everywhere take a close look at the options they are presented with. I understand that having Clinton and Trump as candidates for President is absolutely terrifying, but we need to come to the realization that one of these two are going to be the next President of the United States so we need to be paying attention. We need to look at their policies and their character and do everything possible to make the best possible decision for the future of our country. There is so much more that could happen before Election Day so everyone needs to be tuned into what's happening in the race.
