Presidential candidates Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton finally brought America the reality show it's asked for last Monday night at the first presidential debate. The event was supposed to serve as an opportunity for Donald Trump to prove his late-season pivot was true; less Trumpism, more decent human being, less verbal vomit, more teleprompter style-talk, etc. It was also an opportunity for Hillary Clinton to finally show America how much more "qualified" she is to hold the most important office in the world. A one-on-one with Trump in front of the entire nation would only look to further highlight her accomplishments during the course of her 30-plus years in public service, compared to Trump's zero.

Nope.

Neither happened.

Hillary has very few accomplishments to overcome her record of overwhelming corruption and dishonesty while Trump proved once again that he is who he has always shown us to be: indecent, unknowledgeable, and unrepentant. Here’s a summary of how it played out.

Hillary Refrains From Collapsing

I wrote this a few weeks back about Hillary: “Her need to stay out of the spotlight for her own good to hide her deceitfulness conflicts with her need to remain actively campaigning.” That remains true when it comes to debating, and with a little (a lot) of help from moderator Lester Holt, Hillary came out the clear winner of the first debate (yes, Sean Hannity, Trump lost). While Trump was able to actually take over the debate during the first 30 minutes or so, his inability to continue was largely in part due to Hillary’s successful attempts at getting under Trump's razor-thin skin. Hillary's continual prodding of Trump’s tax returns and business practices not only left Trump and his ego in the spotlight, but threw him into multiple unintelligible, time-consuming mini-tirades which launched him into a tailspin for the remainder of the debate.

She did, however, manage to throw out plenty of Clintonian zingers, one of them being the radical claim that not only are all police racist, but everyone in America is racist. Clinton says police must be cured of their subconscious racism with (unproven) "retraining," citing popular leftist buzzword “implicit bias,” claiming: “I think implicit bias is a problem for everyone, not just police...But when it comes to policing, since it can have literally fatal consequences, I have said, in my first budget, we would put money into that budget to help us deal with implicit bias by retraining a lot of our police officers.” This, of course, fails to address training for Clinton's own apparent "implicit bias" against police and even "white people." Just last month, Hillary threw fuel on the fire when she threw cops under the bus with her "this has got to end" tweet regarding the deaths of Keith Lamont Scott and Terence Crutcher, all before allowing any time to allow the facts to come out.

She continued to praise the disastrous Iran Deal, which Trump rightly pointed out was, and still is, a “terrible deal," and at one point tried to slam Trump with a line that led many paying attention to scratch their heads, saying: “This is a man who…has said women don’t deserve equal pay unless they do as good a job as men.” This is stupid and should not be controversial. Should a woman make the same for doing less work? Should a man make the same amount as a woman for doing less work? Clinton has her own side of the street to clean up on this issue as well, as Townhall.com's Guy Benson pointed out in April: "Male executives at the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation earn 38 percent more than women executives, according to a Daily Caller News Foundation review of the foundation’s latest IRS tax filings."

Unfortunately, this type of race baiting and regressive-feminist speak are big talking points for Hillary and her supporters. As long as Hillary can stick to her talking points with no interjection of fact-checking from her opponent, the one with the “very good brain,” they will continue to be relied on.

Trump Flops

What Hillary lacked in style, Trump equally lacked in substance, which is what he needed considering his version of "style" usually equates to running over his opponents by hitting their looks, insulting their character and/or linking their father with the murder of JFK. That may have worked during the primary, but it won’t work during a one-on-one with an experienced debater such as Hillary Clinton. During the first 30 minutes or so, Trump actually dominated the debate, ripping Hillary on multiple angles from the start such as the economy, foreign policy, and her “bad experience." When Hillary tried to cite her husband Bill Clinton’s economic record, Trump swung back saying, “He approved NAFTA, which is the single worst trade deal in this country,” which, besides the second claim being false, is an appeal to both candidates' bases as both have come out strongly against free trade (as well as Hillary continuously coming out strongly against defending her own husband's presidency).

Where he went wrong, however, far outweighed what he did well. Trump failed to maintain any type of intelligibility when it came to describing the flaws in his opponent, making a mockery of himself in describing multiple issues. For example, on the "birther" issue, he said: “I'll tell you very — well, just very simple to say. Sidney Blumenthal works for the campaign and close — very close friend of Secretary Clinton. And her campaign manager, Patti Doyle, went to — during the campaign, her campaign against President Obama, fought very hard. And you can go look it up, and you can check it out… Look, it's true. Sidney Blumenthal sent a reporter — you just have to take a look at CNN, the last week, the interview with your former campaign manager. And she was involved. But just like she can't bring back jobs, she can't produce.” This type of rambling idiocy is what Trump provided for the majority of the night. Even when he was right on the issue, unorganized, information-less responses such as these made him appear as an angry fool all the while managing to interrupt Hillary an outstanding 51 times throughout the night.

Trump also continued to double-down on a multitude of non-conservative stances, such as agreeing with Hillary to withhold due process for gun purchases to those on the no-fly list, saying: “I agree [with Clinton], and a lot of people even within my own party want to give certain rights to people on watch lists and no-fly lists. I agree with you.” He agreed with Hillary, again, on government-paid childcare, and later made a buffoon of himself (again) while discussing cyber security by continuously calling it “the cyber," as well as citing his 10-year-old son's experience with computers to describe "the cyber," saying: “As far as the cyber, I agree to parts of what Secretary Clinton said…So we have to get very, very tough on cyber and cyber warfare. It is — it is a huge problem. I have a son. He's 10 years old. He has computers. He is so good with these computers, it's unbelievable. The security aspect of cyber is very, very tough. And maybe it's hardly doable. But I will say, we are not doing the job we should be doing. But that's true throughout our whole governmental society. We have so many things that we have to do better, Lester, and certainly cyber is one of them.”

Trump's most embarrassing moment, however, may have came during this defense of his Iraq War stance. Here is that exchange with moderator Lester Holt:

HOLT: Mr. Trump, a lot of these are judgment questions. You had supported the war in Iraq before the invasion. What makes your...

TRUMP: I did not support the war in Iraq.

HOLT: In 2002...

TRUMP: That is a mainstream media nonsense put out by her, because she — frankly, I think the best person in her campaign is mainstream media.

HOLT: My question is, since you supported it...

TRUMP: Just — would you like to hear...

HOLT: ... why is your -—why is your judgment...

TRUMP: Wait a minute. I was against the war in Iraq. Just so you put it out.

HOLT: The record shows otherwise, but why — why was...

TRUMP: The record does not show that.

HOLT: Why was — is your judgment any...

TRUMP: The record shows that I'm right. When I did an interview with Howard Stern, very lightly, first time anyone's asked me that, I said, very lightly, I don't know, maybe, who knows? Essentially. I then did an interview with Neil Cavuto. We talked about the economy is more important. I then spoke to Sean Hannity, which everybody refuses to call Sean Hannity. I had numerous conversations with Sean Hannity at Fox. And Sean Hannity said — and he called me the other day — and I spoke to him about it — he said you were totally against the war, because he was for the war.

HOLT: Why is your judgment better than...

TRUMP: And when he — excuse me. And that was before the war started. Sean Hannity said very strongly to me and other people — he's willing to say it, but nobody wants to call him. I was against the war. He said, you used to have fights with me, because Sean was in favor of the war.

And I understand that side, also, not very much, because we should have never been there. But nobody called Sean Hannity. And then they did an article in a major magazine, shortly after the war started. I think in '04. But they did an article which had me totally against the war in Iraq.

And one of your compatriots said, you know, whether it was before or right after, Trump was definitely — because if you read this article, there's no doubt. But if somebody — and I'll ask the press — if somebody would call up Sean Hannity, this was before the war started. He and I used to have arguments about the war. I said, it's a terrible and a stupid thing. It's going to destabilize the Middle East. And that's exactly what it's done. It's been a disaster.

HOLT: My reference was to what you had said in 2002, and my question was...

TRUMP: No, no. You didn't hear what I said.

HOLT: Why is your judgment — why is your judgment any different than Mrs. Clinton's judgment?

TRUMP: Well, I have much better judgment than she does. There's no question about that. I also have a much better temperament than she has, you know?

(LAUGHTER)

"(LAUGHTER)" is correct. Whining on a presidential debate stage to the moderator and media to call your BFF Sean Hannity to legitimize your stance is not only laughable, it's loony. How one can approve of these types of rambling, nonsensical rants without critique is simply a nasty byproduct of the effect that Trumpism has had on many Republicans and so-called conservatives (See: Hannity, Laura Ingraham, Lyin' Ted, etc.) that cause them to abandon truth for Trump.

Trump knows very little of what he speaks of, and has shown even less of a willingness to learn.

Hillary, on the other hand, is an experienced puppet to those who control her.

With the second debate just around the corner, we'll see what, if any, improvements can be made to these candidates' strategies to make them seem any more appealing before November 8.