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 Entering the Spectator. I'm joined this morning by Luke Thompson, a Republican strategist and a partner at the political consulting firm Applecard.

And we're going to be talking about last night's presidential debate.

Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump clashed quite viciously at times over the economy, tax returns, emails, racism, Obama's birth certificate, and much else besides.

The general reaction in the media seems to be this morning that Hillary Clinton is the one who came out on top.

Now Luke, even from a slightly pro-Trump perspective, I think you'd have to say that he had a very bad night.

Yeah, I would say coming from a pox on both their houses perspective, this was certainly a pretty bad performance from him. The thing that I'm seeing

emerge from the spin that is most interesting is the idea that Hillary won the debate. I don't see

that. I felt like she turned in a poor performance. She just happened to be debating one-on-one with

someone who insisted on repeatedly setting himself on fire. And so while certainly Trump lost the

debate and I think lost it badly, I would look at it if I'm in Brooklyn tonight and say, look,

we got out with a win with what's likely to be the largest TV debate audience in history.

But let's be blunt, the 15 minutes about economics and

lunch pail issues which rolled into an indictment of the political system writ large were

where Donald Trump's best 15 minutes and they came at the beginning of the debate.

And so while he was prosecuting a case against Hillary as an ineffective creature of the establishment

while simultaneously articulating his strong anti-free trade position, a position I don't share

with him, but one that he articulated effectively, I felt like he was in command of the debate.

Outside of that, he put both of his feet in his mouth and then jumped in a

swimming pool. So it was a bad night for him, but it was a bad night of his own creation and not

a bad night because of anything that Hillary Clinton did in particular, either as a deaf

debater or as a pillar of forensic eloquence. I think there was quite a lot of talk beforehand

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