Contrary to popular myth, as I wrote last week, presidential debates are rarely game-changing moments that reorient campaigns. I doubt that Monday night’s much-touted face-off between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump will do anything to change that judgment.

That said, I thought that both stylistically and substantively Clinton had a much stronger night than did Trump.

I write this in something of a conventional wisdom bubble — just before the debate, I decided to close my Twitter window and stop checking email and actually focus on the debate itself. So it may well be that because Donald Trump managed to not actually drool on himself — to borrow the satiric standard my colleague Pat Garofalo noted Monday morning that Trump proponents seemed to be aiming for — he is being adjudged “presidential.”

But if you score the debate straight, without using the political point spread of the expectations game (or as Pat put it, the soft bigotry of Trump expectations), this was a bad night for the Republican nominee.

He was on defense much of the evening. Moderator Lester Holt mixed the general questions one would expect — on the economy, on national security, on race relations — with pointed ones specifically aimed at the candidates. These were largely Trump-focused, a fact which will probably cause Trump partisans to cry bias. But if Trump’s outrageous statements were a yuge focus in the debate, it’s because he has made them a yuge focus in the campaign.

He had to account for them Monday night and his answers ranged from dishonest to farcical to pathetic.

Start with his tax returns. Asked about releasing them, he gave his usual answer about being under audit; both Holt and Clinton noted that’s no reason not to release them. That alone is bad enough, but then Clinton gave a devastating response to which he basically had no reply.

CLINTON: So you’ve got to ask yourself, why won’t he release his tax returns? And I think there may be a couple of reasons. First, maybe he’s not as rich as he says he is. Second, maybe he’s not as charitable as he claims to be. Third, we don’t know all of his business dealings, but we have been told through investigative reporting that he owes about $650 million to Wall Street and foreign banks. Or maybe he doesn’t want the American people, all of you watching tonight, to know that he’s paid nothing in federal taxes, because the only years that anybody’s ever seen were a couple of years when he had to turn them over to state authorities when he was trying to get a casino license, and they showed he didn’t pay any federal income tax.

TRUMP: That makes me smart.

He went on to give a meandering answer that ranged from saying that he doesn’t owe $650 million (The New York Times says otherwise — read its story here and judge for yourself), but even if he did it wouldn’t be that much money. Seriously?

He closed by saying that the U.S. is a debtor nation, which prompted a Clinton interjection: “Maybe because you haven’t paid any federal income tax for a lot of years.” Trump’s reply? “It would be squandered too, believe me.”

This is a key point and should get a lot of attention in coming days: He didn’t deny in any way the idea that he doesn’t pay income taxes; in fact, he seemed to confirm it by saying that “it would be squandered.”

Regardless, he let her lay out the full panoply of theories regarding why he’s hiding his taxes and could only respond with weak sauce about being “very underleveraged” and, later, “It’s all words, it’s all sound-bites.”

When Holt brought up race relations, Trump painted his usual grim picture of an American hell-scape and then audibly groaned when Clinton found nice things to say about African-American communities.

His defense of birtherism was another damning moment: Holt was brutal, pointing out that while Trump claimed to have been pleased with President Barack Obama publicly releasing his birth certificate, he kept pushing birtherism for years afterward. “What do you say to Americans, people of color who –” Holt began at one point, before Trump cut him off: “I say nothing. I say nothing, because I was able to get him to produce it. He should have produced it a long time before. I say nothing.” He later claimed to have done Obama a great service by pressing the non-issue. But the greatest service he did in that sequence was to remind voters that he is unrepentant about pushing an insane, racist conspiracy theory.

Trump was pressed about his record on Iraq, repeating again the lie that he opposed the invasion and getting into an argument with both Clinton and Holt about it. “When I did an interview with Howard Stern, very lightly, first time anyone’s asked me that, I said, very lightly, I don’t know, maybe, who knows? Essentially,” he said Monday night. His actual answer about supporting was: “Yeah, I guess so.” His rewrite of history was actually less pathetic, though, than his repeated exhortation for people to call Sean Hannity — who has basically served as Trump’s Fox News press secretary — to affirm his opposition to the war.

And that was less pathetic than when the audience actually laughed at him when he said, “I also have a much better temperament than she has, you know?”

The parade of Trump’s greatest hits concluded with Holt asking the former reality TV star about his saying that Clinton doesn’t have a “presidential look,” a comment which he lamely tried to explain away as referring to her stamina. First she dismissed the stamina question by talking about her globe-trotting as secretary of state and then her 11 hours of testimony before Congress on Benghazi; then she circled back to bomb him on the looks question: “He tried to switch from looks to stamina,” she said. “But this is a man who has called women pigs, slobs and dogs and someone who has said pregnancy is an inconvenience to employers” and so on, concluding with his criticizing a Latina model.

Trump’s response? To whine about how mean the ads she’s running against him are. Seriously, that was it. Suck it up, tough guy. And again his ad problem is the same as his debate problem: Her ads predominately just replay his own words; in both cases he was hoist on his own petard.

And he often flailed on the general, expected questions. He flip-flopped again on the Federal Reserve, saying that Chairwoman Janet Yellen is being political ( he’s been back and forth on his views on interest rates and Yellen several times over the last few months); he bizarrely tried to portray stop-and-frisk as some sort of gun control program (and was wrong on both the program being unconstitutional and on the fact that New York City’s murder rate has continued down to record lows without it); he was simply incoherent on nuclear policy, not denying the fact that he’s spoken favorably about countries like Japan, South Korea and Saudi Arabia getting the bomb whilst saying that “nuclear is the single greatest threat.” In one sentence he said he “would certainly not do first strike” and in the next insisted that he would not take any options off the table.

He even whiffed on a chance to bring up her email server when they were both asked about cybersecurity — a startling missed opportunity on his part. The issue did come up in the debate and he chastised her then, saying that he and the country found her behavior “disgraceful.” But she had already given the best answer she could on the question: “You know, I made a mistake using a private e-mail. 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.” She was short, to the point, contrite and she took unconditional responsibility.

Moving from the substantive to the stylistic level, Trump fared little better.

Clinton came across as calm, relaxed and in command throughout. He repeatedly tried to talk over her — a classic, Trumpian dominance ritual — but she largely ignored him and serenely plowed on through. His attempts to demonstrate his own strength by throwing her off only ended up looking pathetic because she didn’t take the bait. And that’s putting aside how the image of a bossy man trying to shout down a strong woman will play with the female voters.

And not for nothing, his intrusions often made him look bad. I suspect we’ll see an ad in the coming weeks with her recounting his rooting for the housing collapse and his interjecting, smarmily, “That’s called business, by the way” before she continued recounting that 9 million people lost their jobs and 5 million lost their homes.

She even got in a few clearly preplanned shots at him: “I know you live in your own reality, but…” and “Just join the debate by saying more crazy things” and “Just listen to what you heard” when he gave a ludicrous defense of his birtherism.

Meanwhile he shouted and pouted. If Al Gore got dinged in 2000 for his sighs and eye-rolls, Trump should get the same treatment for his constantly interrupting Clinton, at least once with an audible groan, and for his occasional weird mugging for the camera as she spoke.

Half-serious question: Why doesn’t Donald Trump smile more?

If the debate was a battle over who could be more unflappable, Clinton’s bemused serenity trumped Trump’s noisy interruptions.

There was a small but clear sign that she got to him. At the debate’s start he made a point of calling her Secretary Clinton. “Is that OK?” he asked her. “Good. I want you to be very happy. It’s very important to me.” By debate’s end he was calling her Hillary and complaining about how mean she was to him.

She got under his very thin skin. Advantage, Clinton.

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Hillary Clinton Beat Donald Trump on Substance, Style in the First Debate originally appeared on usnews.com