Kids React To Monday's Presidential Debate

More than 80 million people tuned in for the presidential debate last night, making the first showdown between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump the most watched televised presidential debate ever. And adults weren’t the only ones tuning in: In a video from SheKnows, kids react to the presidential debate, and their impressions are surprisingly perceptive. These youngsters may not be eligible to vote, but they clearly recognize that the election will impact their lives, too.

The five kids in the video of course only make up a (very) small sample of America’s children, so they aren’t representative of everyone in their age group. Nevertheless, they picked up on a lot of the same issues in the debate as adult viewers. One girl starts out by saying, “Donald’s performance was just… it was funny.” The kids go on to note Trump’s repetitiveness. “Donald Trump just keeps saying the same thing over and over again, like it’ll have more meaning each time he says it,” one girl says.

Trump may have touted his “winning temperament” in the debate (which earned him some serious side eye from a lot of people), but the kids in the video recognize his unpresidential behavior pretty quickly. “Donald Trump has been raging a lot. He’s been getting angry and interrupting people,” a young male viewer observes. He isn’t the only one to notice Trump’s frequent interruptions of Clinton, which totaled 51 by the end of the debate (Clinton, in turn, interrupted Trump only 17 times). “Donald Trump interrupted her so many times,” a girl comments. “It was very rude.”

The kids also talk about weighty issues like equal pay, taxes (“Pay your taxes, dude!”, one of the commentators urges), and stop-and-frisk. A young girl gets to root of the problem with stop-and-frisk with surprising clarity: “Would you want your brother, or your dad, or your son, or your daughter, or your sister to be randomly stopped in the street and patted down for doing nothing? That doesn’t sound like equal rights to anyone, does it?”

The next president will be with us for the next four to eight years, and will no doubt have a major effect on the lives of American children and teens. It’s good to see this bunch paying such close attention to the proceedings.

Images: YouTube (2)