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Was Donald Trump On Cocaine During Last Night’s Presidential Debate?

By Sahash Khanal
Published on: 23:19 PST, Sep 26, 2016

Donald Trump may very well be taking his tax returns with him to the grave. But tonight’s presidential debate has a lot of people thinking that the Donald may also have another dark secret. Apparently a lot of people are convinced that Trump has a cocaine problem. Yikes!

Early on in the debate, people started noticing that Trump was sniffing a lot, a symptom apparently common in cocaine users. Now of course, a cold would have made more sense, but no, this was Trump. He wasn’t getting away that easy. The conspiracy theory took off when the ex-governor of Vermont, Howard Dean, who unsuccessfully ran for the Democratic Nomination back in 2004, tweeted what seemed to have been itching everyone’s mind. His tweet has already been retweeted 22,000 times and liked 33,000 times.

That’s when everyone else decided to join the party. Now while it is highly unlikely that the GOP presidential nominee showed up at his first presidential debate high on coke, some of the tweets were nevertheless amusing.

Steve Colbert of the late night show evidently saw the humor in these accusations and make a sly remark to the other big accusation made on Trump following last night’s debate: he interrupted Hillary; a lot.

According to Conrad Hackett, a Senior Demographer and Associate Director of Pew Research, Trump interrupted Hillary a total of 51 times during the debate. That’s 19 times more than Clinton interrupted, as Hackett showed via this interactive graphic.

The Republican nominee started the debate with a calm demeanor with a lot of analysts thinking he was actually getting the better of his counterpart, Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. But it all went haywire after questions of racism and Trump’s tax returns started pouring in. Regarding Trump failing to produce his tax returns, the Republican nominee decided to stick to his original answer.

“I don’t mind releasing — I’m under a routine audit. And it’ll be released. And — as soon as the audit’s finished, it will be released.”

[Image by Drew Angerer/Getty Images]

The Debate’s host Lester Holt pointed out that the IRS had said that it was possible for Trump to publish his tax returns even during an audit. Trump dodged the notion, instead offering his financial statement.

“But you will learn more about Donald Trump by going down to the federal elections, where I filed a 104-page essentially financial statement of sorts, the forms that they have. It shows income — in fact, the income — I just looked today — the income is filed at $694 million for this past year, $694 million. If you would have told me I was going to make that 15 or 20 years ago, I would have been very surprised.”

Trump then attempted to divert the negative attention towards Hillary.

“I will release my tax returns — against my lawyer’s wishes — when she [Hillary] releases her 33,000 e-mails that have been deleted. As soon as she releases them, I will release.”

Clinton first apologized for her email scandal then diverted the attention back to Trump. This was the turning point in the debate, and after this point Hillary began attacking Trump on issues of his tax returns, business practices, birtherism, sexism, and racism, while the Republican Nominee looked vulnerable. By the end, Trump seemed convinced that the debate had been targeted towards him and had ignored the controversies surrounding Hillary.

Last night’s presidential debate was the first in a series of four debates, this and two other Presidential debates (Oct. 9, Washington University in St. Louis & Oct 19, University of Nevada, Las Vegas) and one Vice Presidential debate (Oct 04, Longwood University, Farmville, Virginia). These debates are organized by the bipartisan Commission on Presidential Debates (CoP).

If you missed the debates last night, you can either read the Washington Post’s annotated transcript of the debate or you can watch the debate below:

[Feature Image by Win McNamee/Getty Images]

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