Hillary Clinton baited Donald Trump during Monday night's presidential debate and the billionaire real-estate tycoon swallowed the hook, according to Vanity Fair.
"Clinton baited Trump, and Trump showed up unprepared … Clinton won," the magazine's T.A. Frank said in a column published Tuesday.
"If Trump's polls keep going up after this week, then the discontent in the nation is even greater than most of us realize. But it's likelier that the galloping polls of Trump come to a halt.
"All he needed to do was prove to viewers that he could act presidential for 90 minutes. All Clinton needed to do was prove that he couldn't. And she succeeded."
Clinton's attacks against Trump were "entirely predictable, based on things well covered in the news: his business disputes, his tax secrecy, his comments about women, and his birtherism," Frank added.
"Often, the best response from Trump would have been to ignore it. Otherwise, the best approach would have been to trot out some rehearsed response. Instead, he jumped wildly at every wave of the cape, or he offered an improvised mess.
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