Donald Trump was tripped up in Monday’s debate as much by his own ego and lack of preparation as he was by his opponent on the stage, says legendary broadcast journalist Tom Brokaw.
“[Trump] started like he kind of listened to some of his advisers, but then he played to his worst instincts,” Brokaw, who moderated a presidential debate in 2008, told David Axelrod on “The Axe Files” podcast, produced by the University of Chicago Institute of Politics and CNN.
“Look, he’s got an enormous ego,” Brokaw continued. “He just thinks because he won the Republican nomination with a record number of votes, he can do no wrong; and that’s a commentary on political naiveté, frankly.”
One of the criticisms of Hillary Clinton’s debate performance was that she was “overprepared,” but Brokaw believes that’s a primary reason she did so well. “When [Clinton] gets prepared, she’s the best orator in the room,” Brokaw said. “A highly skillful performance, in my judgment.”
Brokaw, who hasn’t lost the everyman touch he developed growing up in South Dakota, said he believes Clinton made “a big mistake” when she referred to half of Trump’s supporters as “deplorables.”
“That only irritates and divides the country, it doesn’t unite the country in some way,” Brokaw said. “Somebody said to me, ‘Well, it’s true.’ And I said, ‘If you’re a hardware store owner in a small town in Iowa, on Main Street, you know, you’re not happy with her and you’re kind of looking at him, and then she says that. Guess where you’re going to go? You’re going to go to him.'”
In his decades with NBC News, Brokaw has covered 12 presidential elections and any number of national tragedies and triumphs. Evaluating all that he’s seen in that time, Brokaw said he believes America is currently experiencing an unprecedented period of disruption. “In my adult lifetime, I don’t remember a time when the fabric of America had become so unraveled.”
Brokaw believes this upheaval began when America was attacked by al Qaeda on September 11, 2001. “I think we’re in an unmoored place in this country right now. There’s so many deep divisions, and people are trying to figure out where they fit into it and what’s happened to the country,” Brokaw said. “I think it began with 9/11, because 9/11 undid a sense of security” and was soon followed by “the disastrous invasion of Iraq” and then the economic turmoil that began in late 2008 with the financial crisis.
“It was just a sequence, a bunch of bricks beginning to fall out of the structure of America as a result of 9/11,” Brokaw concluded.
To hear the whole conversation with Brokaw, which also included his experience covering Ronald Reagan in the 1960s, his memories of being in Berlin on the evening the wall fell, the challenges he faces after having been diagnosed with cancer in 2013, and the exact moment he knew he wanted to be an NBC News journalist, click on http://podcast.cnn.com. To get “The Axe Files” podcast every week, subscribe at http://itunes.com/theaxefiles.