Hello and welcome to The Spectator's Americano podcast, a special series of discussions about the biggest political event of this year, the 2016 US presidential election.

My name is Freddie Gray and I'm Deputy Edger of the Spectator. And today we're going to be talking about the second presidential debate, which finished a few hours ago.

I'm joined by Matthew Walter, who is the associate editor for the Washington Free Beacon,

and he's actually in St. Louis, and he's been speaking to the Trump campaign.

The impression here in London is that Trump probably overall won the debate,

but the campaign is still in crisis somewhat over

the lewd sex bragging tape that came out on Friday. Is that a fair assessment? Yes, I think both

of those things are definitely true. In fact, I sometimes wonder if Trump didn't blow the first

debate on purpose so that he could have this sort of

spectacular reality TV sort of reversal tonight.

Speaking of strange reality TV stunts, the extraordinary press conference he put on before the

debate, it seems to me to have been pretty spectacularly weird, even by Trump's standards.

It was very strange, but it was typical

of Trump and his sort of attention-grabbing tactics because all these journalists are sitting down

trying to find their seats and get ready for the debate, and suddenly they're wondering,

what's going on here? What's he doing now? Yeah. What were journalists saying at that at that point?

Give us a bit of a sense of what was going on.

Well, I think that the sense was that he knew that Hillary Clinton was going to try to go after him for the comments that he made in the leaked audio tape that came out from the Washington Post last week.

And that this was sort of his novelty bizarre attempt to preempt any criticism

that she was going to make.

I'm not sure that that quite worked out for him.

And I think he probably overcommitted himself by saying tonight that he never engaged

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