From talks about the economy and the ISIS, to tax evasions by Trump and deleted e-mails by Clinton, the first presidential debate opened--as predicted--with personal jabs and digs at one another.
The debate stage for Republican presidential nominee Donald John Trump and Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton is set at Hofstra University on Long Island, in the village of Hempstead in New York, CNN reports. Although the two started off the 90-minute debate by shaking hands, they didn't hold back in their criticisms of one another as soon as the debate started.
Of Trump, Clinton implied that he had skewed facts (and that people could refer to the correct facts on her website), that he lived in his own reality, that he was out of touch with the complexities of the U.S. economy, and that he "has paid nothing in federal taxes" despite his claims to wealth and charitable activities.
On the topic of tax evasion, Trump replied that it was a smart move on his end to have avoided paying federal income tax for some years. Clinton went on to imply that Trump himself has admitted to being "The King of Debt" and that he was also known to have "stiffed" thousands of contractors of the Trump Organization.
For Trump's part, he criticized how Clinton had divulged her plan on how to fight the ISIS on her website (as opposed to keeping a secret plan), and how Clinton refused to make public some of her e-mails which were deemed controversial. Trump also pointed out Clinton's aversion to saying "law and order" on the topic of racial issues and crime. On running America, Trump says that Clinton failed as a politician as she didn't understand how to run a business, which to him was the reason the country's economy was not moving forward. Trump also claimed that Clinton would drive businesses out.
"It is about time that this country had someone running it that understood something about money," Trump claimed, as reported by Bloomberg. Trump graduated with a degree in Economics at Wharton, while Clinton earned a law degree at Yale.
With just 43 days before the Nov. 8 elections, Clinton and Trump are doing what they can to get ahead of the other as they are neck and neck in the polls at 46%.
