Yesterday, on the morning before the second presidential debate, I found myself at the National Naval Aviation Museum in Pensacola, Florida. Amid the wonderland of steel and wooden planes, parked on the floors or dangling from the ceiling, I noticed a small exhibit devoted to President George H. W. Bush.
It reminded visitors of how Bush had become America’s youngest qualified Navy pilot, getting his wings just days before his 19th birthday. How he had flown mission after mission against the Japanese in the Pacific. There was a brief reference to how he was once forced to bail out in the middle of the ocean – after, I learned from Wikipedia, being hit by anti-aircraft fire but still completing his bombing run with engine ablaze.
Funnily enough, there was no mention of how, decades later, he had preceded a pivotal debate with Bill Clinton by calling a surprise press conference at which he sat approvingly beside a woman who accused the Arkansas governor of rape. Because back in 1992, such an idea would have been unimaginable.
To appreciate how degraded American politics has become, it can sometimes help to get a little bit of perspective – to consider how unimaginable much of the current spectacle would have been even four years ago, let alone 24.
In Pensacola, I was visiting a temple to American military heroism. Hours later, a man who dodged the Vietnam draft due to bone spurs in his heels would do his best to drag the Republic down with him.
It wasn’t just the press conference at which Trump paraded a series of women, including Juanita Broaddrick, who have accused Bill Clinton of sexual assault and Hillary of complicity – and then sat in the debate auditorium as Trump’s guests. (“It’s hard to believe this is happening”, said the commentators at CNN.)
It was the attempts by Trump to cast doubt on the validity of the process by recruiting “election observers” to prevent “Crooked Hillary” from “rigging this election”. It was the fact that, in the wake of the “Trump tapes”, a damaged candidate’s only option appeared to be to drag the debate, and the election, into the gutter.
Given the incendiary context, the debate started deceptively slowly. True, there was no handshake – but what would you expect under the circumstances? Trump spoke slowly, almost somnolently: his famous sniff from the first debate appeared to have returned.
But soon, the mud was flying. “Bill Clinton attacked those same women, attacked them viciously,” Trump said of his guests. Hillary, having promised to take the high road, swiftly started rolling around in the muck, running through a list of Trump’s “greatest hits” – mocking a disabled journalist, casting doubt on the neutrality of a Hispanic-American judge, peddling the “racist lie” that Barack Obama was not born in America.
But no matter how low she went, Trump went lower. She – Clinton was always “she” – had beaten Bernie Sanders, “but not fair and square in my opinion”. He referred to her as “the devil”. He promised, if appointed president, to appoint a “special prosecutor” to investigate her – because “there has never been so many lies, there has never been so much deception”.
It’s a good thing Donald Trump isn’t writing the laws, she said a few seconds later. “Because you’d be in jail,” he replied. A few minutes later, he added: “She should be put in jail.”
In other words, this wasn’t a debate. It was a meltdown of the body politic.
The odd thing is, apart from the banana-republic threats to jail his opponent and all the rest of it, it wasn’t actually that bad a night for Trump (CNN’s instant, Democrat-leaning sample gave the debate to Clinton 57-34, but 64 per cent said he did better than expected). As the debate went on, he was able to fire off a word salad of insults. All Clinton could offer was a strained, long-suffering grin, endless pleas to visit her website, and platitudes along the lines of “We are great because we’re good” and “I celebrate our diversity”.
But the problem is with his strategy. Yes, Trump made the idea of a President Hillary Clinton much less attractive. But in the process, he made the idea of a President Donald Trump even more terrifying.
And that’s because his approach was not to present his own qualifications for the highest office, but to delegitimise Hillary Clinton – not just as a presidential candidate, or as a politician, but as a person.
As the debate wore on, every question became an excuse to dredge up some sin from her past, real or imagined. In fact, it was ironic that a debate that began by discussing Trump’s contempt for women was permeated by his contempt for one in particular. (Oh, and for the moderators, whom he repeatedly accused of being biased in favour of Hillary.)
And it was that, more than any one line or any one moment, more than Hillary’s defensive waffling on her emails or Trump’s incoherence on Syria, that is the key takeaway from this debate. This campaign – and especially the Republican candidate – has not just departed from the democratic norms, but trampled all over them.
Trump is not merely the beneficiary of a divided country: he is doing everything in his power to crowbar open those divisions – to pit American against American, to foster his supporters’ conspiratorial conviction that a victory by Hillary Clinton, a woman with “tremendous hate in her heart”, cannot possibly be acceptable, or perhaps even legal. Even the moniker he has given her – “Crooked Hillary” – speaks to that theme.
America – and the Western world – is facing colossal challenges. The candidates referred to some of them: the country’s debt burden, its sluggish growth, the problems with Obamacare, the way growth has been spread unequally, the quagmire in the Syria and its ghastly human consequences.
Instead of a frank discussion about how to fix any of that, or even any genuine moments of communion and empathy between voters and candidates, we got a shambles. A shitshow. A 90-minute spectacle of American democracy at its worst.
Part of the blame for that obviously falls on Hillary Clinton, a tarnished and uninspiring candidate who comes with not just a bit of baggage but a whole wagon train. But most of it must surely fall on Donald Trump.
George H. W. Bush, whom I mentioned above, is reported not to be voting for Donald Trump. Nor are John McCain or Mitt Romney. They, like many other Republicans, do not believe that their candidate is suited for the White House.
On the present evidence, you can see why.
