CHAMPAIGN - Central Illinois Congressman Rodney Davis (IL-13) - who endorsed Donald Trump soon after the Republican Party nominated him - thinks Trump could have done much better Monday night in the first presidential debate.
Davis told The Hill that Trump missed key opportunities to expose the Democrats' nominee's weaknesses when moderator Lester Holt asked him about cybersecurity:
“There is no better question to be able to pivot on when she completely failed on her own cybersecurity when she was secretary of State,” added Rep. Rodney Davis (R-Ill.).
Davis, who backed Trump after he won the nomination, said the businessman should have done a better job prosecuting foreign policy failures that occurred while her husband, Bill Clinton, was president and while she was running the State Department.
The Illinois congressman said he would have knocked Bill Clinton for giving foreign aid to North Korea during the 1990s, money the congressman says helped the communist nation develop a nuclear arsenal.
“If Hillary Clinton is trying to own the successes of the Bill Clinton presidency, she’s gonna have to own the failures," Davis said. "And a complete failure was negotiating with North Korea.”
Trump, he added, also missed a “golden opportunity” to remind voters that State Department officials working for Clinton had been concerned about whether Marines responding to the 2012 terror attacks in Benghazi, Libya, should wear their uniforms. Those officials should have been focused on sending in military aircraft, Davis said.
“Those are two points I think [Trump] could have hit and he didn’t,” Davis continued. “And I think he took things a little too personal and missed a lot of opportunities to make very good debate points that could have scored him much higher in the eyes of the American public.”
