article: While opinion is divided, Mrs Clinton is largely thought to have come out on top in Sunday's debate in St Louis. But columnists raised the issue of her failure to tackle Mr Trump effectively, allowing him to "exceed expectations". "The smiling Hillary we saw throughout the first debate on Long Island? She didn't make the trip west." Fox News concludes that Mr Trump managed to pull off a surprising performance, although the news channel does not explicitly state that the Republican candidate won the debate. The conservative network says he performed well, pivoting and manoeuvring through questions, allowing him to save his presidential hopes. Political analyst William Whelan said the night fell into the hands of Mr Trump. He said the Republican defended his record and unlike the first debate, when he was often blown off course by the former secretary of state and "torpedoed by his own badgering performance", he improved as the night went on. Mr Trump's decision to launch a blistering attack against Hillary Clinton and her husband is described by Fox as the equivalent of "Hillary dropping Alicia Machado on Trump" in the previous debate. That was the line used by Breitbart news, which is in a minority in handing the title to Mr Trump. In a leading story quoting comments from former mayor of New York City, Rudy Giuliani, it reports that Mrs Clinton was "pounded on bad decisions". It refers to accusations from Mr Trump that Mrs Clinton and the Democratic Party helped "create the vacuum in the Middle East" that allowed so-called Islamic State to form. The hard-right news website, whose executive chairman Stephen Bannon was appointed Mr Trump's campaign chief in August, is running its own readers' poll, the results of which have yet to be announced. The site also highlights support from Republican vice-presidential nominee Mike Pence, who said in a tweet that he was proud of Mr Trump and congratulated him on "a big debate win", while ending it with a shortened form of Mr Trump's 'Make America Great Again' slogan. "All Hillary Clinton had to do was remain upright for 90 minutes." The Washington Post's verdict is that the debate highlighted an "increasingly isolated" Mr Trump during an "unusually dark and bitter face-off". Over the past year, the newspaper has been at the forefront of investigations into Mr Trump, and has published several editorials condemning the candidate. On the news site's Right Turn blog, Jennifer Rubin says Mrs Clinton had very little to do in order to go "the last little way in wrapping up the election". She writes that Mrs Clinton handled the audience well when answering questions, adding that the former secretary of state effectively won the debate early on by "simply keeping her cool". Issues ranging from Mr Trump's tax payments to his foreign policy have, according to the Post, given Mrs Clinton plenty of material for a new raft of political ads. In a separate piece for the Post, opinion writer Eugene Joseph Dionne Jr writes that Mr Trump's "petulant" and "boorish" approach on the night was
summary: The US media have given their verdict on who won the second presidential debate after Republican Donald Trump and Democrat Hillary Clinton engaged in attack and counter-attack.