Second debate shores up waffling Trump supporter

My sister, Peggy, knew she wasn't voting for Hillary, despite the fact that they both started as Goldwater girls. But could my favorite member of the "basket of deplorables,'' as I like to call her, vote for Trump?

She has been going back and forth on it for a year, vertiginous with the vicissitudes of trying to be a Republican in the Year of Trump.

She jumped off the Trump train whenever he said offensive things and when he retweeted an unflattering picture of Heidi Cruz, but tentatively came back when he apologized for that picture after I told Trump that he had lost her vote.

But Peggy wanted to stick with the Republican Party. She was still considering voting for Trump when she watched the first debate and he started his weeklong meltdown over Alicia Machado, including crazed 3 a.m. tweets on a possible sex tape, and he lost her again.

"I've been waiting for him to grow up,'' she told me. "At the debate I saw how Hillary needled him and got under his skin and after all these months, if he hasn't been able to control that, I don't feel that he'd be able to control it in the White House.

"I've always hated fat-shaming of women and to watch him do that is sickening. It's disgusting. He's sending the wrong message to young women in this country."

She decided he was so erratic he belonged in St. Elizabeths, the mental institution in D.C.

[Personal attacks take forefront in bitter debate between Clinton, Trump]

She came over to my house to watch the second town hall debate, her mind still roiling about her vote. She did not consider the "Access Hollywood" tape a deal-breaker about returning to Trump.

"I think it was disgusting but it was more bluster,'' she said. "He wanted to seem like 'the guy' with Billy Bush. I still believe in my heart that half of what he says and does is just bravado to make him look bigger and better. Somewhere along the line, he got an inferiority complex. He's all mixed up.

"I get when he says it was 'locker-room talk.' I have been a jock all my life. I have been around jocks and sports players and male friends. You're around this element and you hear this language. Not all men, but the majority of men participate."

But she was not optimistic about Trump's ability to be contrite and humble in the debate and explain the vulgar Billy Bush tape. And when the video of Trump's bizarre St. Louis press conference before the debate with several of the women accusing Bill Clinton of sexual assault hit the internet, Peggy thought that was a "totally high school move" by Trump.

[Fact-checking the second Clinton-Trump presidential debate]

"I think it will cause women to feel sympathetic to Hillary,'' Peggy said, shaking her head. "It will remind them of what she's had to go through with Bill. Bill is not running for office. Maybe Hillary did enable at some point, but I think that was for survival. When she was defending Bill in the beginning, he was denying it. When she pulled that Right Wing Conspiracy stuff, she really believed his lies, that he had never been involved."

Then we watched the debate, as the vultures circled on both sides of the aisle, trying to figure out if Trump could survive the night or if he would be dumped by the morrow.

"I think he did really well,'' Peggy said. "He has done what the Republicans criticized him for not doing in the first debate, attacking her on Libya and the emails. He kept his voice calm even when he criticizes her. I like the way he walked around to stay in the picture when Hillary was talking. I think Christie and Rudy have prepared him better. He didn't interrupt her on every sentence and he seems like he's more aware of what's going on. He even seemed to know where Aleppo is. He made good points that energy is under siege in the Obama Administration and that she wants to put coal miners out of work.''

When Trump chastised Hillary for calling his supporters "deplorable" and "irredeemable,'' Peggy called out, "Good boy!"

In the end, my conservative sister concluded: "I could see him as president.''

Maureen Dowd is a columnist for The New York Times.

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