WIRED's Cheat Sheet to the Feisty First Presidential Debate

There have, perhaps, never been two more diametrically different presidential candidates than Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. Which is why, after last night's rowdy and antagonistic first debate, we just want to start off by saying:

There's a lot to unpack in their answers, particularly when it comes to issues that impact the WIRED world. Throughout their 95 commercial-free minutes on stage, moderated by NBC's Lester Holt, the candidates demonstrated their knowledge (or lack thereof) on WIRED issues ranging from climate change to cyber warfare to the future of the economy to trade. Here's how they stacked up.

Holt asked both candidates how they would "create the kinds of jobs that will put more money into the pockets of American workers." Only Clinton used that time to talk about what we at WIRED call the jobs of the future. "I want us to invest in your future," she said. "That means jobs in infrastructure, in advanced manufacturing, innovation and technology, clean, renewable energy, and small business."

Clinton is also the only one of them who has laid out a policy agenda for technology and innovation, in which she proposes investing in computer science education, forgiving some student loans for people starting new companies or joining a startup, and expanding broadband access to every home in the US by the year 2020, a process President Obama has already begun.

Trump, by contrast, used this time to talk mainly about the jobs the country has lost. "Our jobs are fleeing the country. They're going to Mexico. They're going to many other countries," he said.

In particular, he lamented that Ford had recently moved a factory to Mexico. “Thousands of jobs leaving Michigan, leaving Ohio,” he said. “They're all leaving.”

But this observation is only half true. Yes, Ford is moving small vehicle manufacturing from Michigan to Mexico, but—as we wrote last week and pointed out in our live fact-checklast night—the plant in Detroit will now be producing larger, more profitable vehicles, and CEO Mark Fields has said that "zero jobs" will be lost.

During the debate, Ford even took to Twitter to defend itself.

But what's as troubling as this fudging of the details is the fact that Trump didn't offer much in the way of solutions, except to say that his tax plan, which reduces tax rates from 35 to 15 percent, would create jobs. And yet, groups like credit rating firm Moody's have warned that actually, Trump's tax plan would "result in larger federal government deficits and a heavier debt load," which could hurt job creation.

"By the end of his presidency, there are close to 3.5 million fewer jobs and the unemployment rate rises to as high as 7 percent, compared with below 5 percent today," Moody's estimates.

While Trump is right to recognize the millions of Americans who see their way of making a living slipping away, his unwillingness to offer substantive ideas about how to prepare American workers for this increasingly technologically focused and automated economy is troubling.

There wasn't nearly enough discussion during the debate of the very real risks of climate change, as far as we're concerned. But Clinton managed to slip in some clean energy bullet points as she laid out her jobs plan. "We can deploy a half a billion more solar panels. We can have enough clean energy to power every home," she said. "We can build a new modern electric grid. That's a lot of jobs; that's a lot of new economic activity."

Clinton's climate plan has earned her the endorsement of the League of Conservation Voters, among others. But talking climate also gave Clinton a chance to recite one of her favorite talking points about Trump. "Donald thinks that climate change is a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese," she said, adding: "I think it's real."

Trump quickly contradicted Clinton, asserting he never said that. The only problem is: he did. On Twitter. A few times.

Trump didn't add anything more to the climate discussion, except to note that the US has invested in solar in the past and it was "a disaster." Presumably, he was talking about the Solyndra scandal, when a once-promising solar company went bust, briefly taking the clean energy market with it.

But in the past, he has said he would "cancel" the historic Paris Climate Agreement and stop all payments of US tax dollars to the UN's global warming initiatives. So we pretty much know where he stands. And you know where WIRED stands.

Clinton only had to answer one question about her emails. In an election cycle dominated by email scandal, surely that's some kind of record. Trump raised the issue when he was talking about his own tax returns, which he said he would release as soon as Clinton releases the 33,000 emails that her team deleted from her private server.

"You know, I made a mistake using a private e-mail," Clinton responded, when Holt pressed her. "And if I had to do it over again, I would, obviously, do it differently. But I'm not going to make any excuses. It was a mistake, and I take responsibility for that."

Trump went on to say that it was "more than a mistake." "That was done purposely," he said, and of course that's true. But Trump missed a big opportunity to dive deeper into the issue by calling out Clinton's private email server for the security nightmare that it is. He could have pointed to FBI director James Comey's comments that “any reasonable person in Secretary Clinton’s position or in the position of those with whom she was corresponding about those matters should have known that an unclassified system was no place for that conversation.”

But because Trump didn't—and Clinton certainly wasn't going to bring it up—we missed out on what could have been a substantive conversation about what it takes to handle secure information as president.

Just one more time.

Neither candidate had much to offer in the way of solutions to the threat of cyber warfare. But Clinton, at least, demonstrated a basic knowledge of what it is. She focused specifically on the threat nation state hackers pose to cybersecurity. "We need to make it very clear—whether it's Russia, China, Iran or anybody else—the United States has much greater capacity," she said. "And we are not going to sit idly by and permit state actors to go after our information, our private-sector information or our public-sector information."

Clinton also talked about defeating ISIS online, saying, "We need to do much more with our tech companies to prevent ISIS and their operatives from being able to use the Internet to radicalize, even direct people in our country and Europe and elsewhere." But Clinton's comments stopped, as they often do, right there, without further detail about how she would compel the tech industry to work hand in hand with the government, an obligation they've resisted in the past when it sacrifices their users' privacy. Apple's role in resisting weakened encryption is a prime example of that.

Trump, on the other hand, said that it might not have been Russia that hacked the Democratic National Committee, despite the fact that security researchers assess that it was. He said, instead, "It also could be somebody sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds, OK?"

Not only is that an egregious stereotype of the average Internet nerd, it’s an outdated stereotype. C’mon, everyone knows Soylent keeps you thin. Somehow, it only got worse. Here's what else Trump had to say about cyber security, presented without interruption:

We came up with the Internet, and I think Secretary Clinton and myself would agree very much, when you look at what ISIS is doing with the Internet, they're beating us at our own game. ISIS.

So we have to get very, very tough on cyber and cyber warfare. It is—it is a huge problem. I have a son. He's 10 years old. He has computers. He is so good with these computers, it's unbelievable. The security aspect of cyber is very, very tough. And maybe it's hardly doable.

But I will say, we are not doing the job we should be doing. But that's true throughout our whole governmental society. We have so many things that we have to do better, Lester, and certainly cyber is one of them.

With that, Trump confirmed our worst fears that when he actually said something coherent about cybersecurity a few weeks ago, he was merely reading the words someone else had fed him. Here, he demonstrates a stunning lack of awareness about the difference between cybersecurity—which involves protecting the country, its citizens, and businesses against hackers—and the radicalization of terrorists on social media.

These are wholly distinct problems, and they are, perhaps, the most pressing problems the next president will face. They deserve that person's attention. Because Barron Trump is cute and all, but we're not sure he's up to the task.