Credit Illustration by Oliver Munday; Source: PAUL J. RICHARDS / AFP / Getty (Clinton); Win McNamee / Getty (Trump)
Shortly before the second Presidential debate began, on Sunday night, John Podhoretz, the editor of Commentary and a New York Post columnist, remarked on Twitter that this was “the weirdest single moment in modern American political history.” Some people who lived through Watergate, or the farcical impeachment of Bill Clinton, might argue with that statement, but one thing can be said without fear of contradiction: this was the darkest and nastiest Presidential debate in modern history.
The debate took place two days after the release of a 2005 video in which Trump could be heard boasting about groping and assaulting women. The video had prompted droves of Trump’s fellow-Republicans to desert him, and, in the lead-up to Sunday’s debate, many people were suggesting that Trump might be forced out the Presidential race. By the end of the night, however, the television pundits were proclaiming that Trump had probably done well enough to fight on—at least until his campaign is hit with some other shocker.
But what really lingered from the debate, which took place at Washington University, in St. Louis, was the sense of the depths to which this election has sunk. To be sure, there were some substantive exchanges about taxes, health care, and foreign policy. But these discussions were almost a sideshow. From the moment on Friday afternoon when the Washington Post published its story about the 2005 video, Sunday’s affair was inevitably going to be the “Grab them by the pussy” debate.
Trump, as is his wont, was on the offensive from the start. Eschewing the advice of the Republican strategist Karl Rove and others, who had urged Trump to adopt a contrite stance and present himself as a change agent for Washington, Trump did what he has clearly been aching to do for months: he tried to change the subject to Bill Clinton. Just before he took the debate stage, Trump held a surprise press conference alongside three women—Juanita Broaddrick, Paula Jones, and Kathleen Willey—who have levelled sexual-assault allegations against the former President that date back decades and have been vigorously contested. Also present was a woman named Kathy Shelton, who was raped when she was twelve years old, and whose assailant was assigned a young lawyer named Hillary Clinton to help defend him in court.
During the debate itself, the four women were sitting in the audience, guests of the Trump campaign. After an initial question from an audience member—the debate had been billed as a town hall—CNN’s Anderson Cooper, one of the two moderators, got right to the point, saying, “Mr. Trump, about the tape that was released on Friday . . . you called what you said locker-room banter. You described kissing women without consent, grabbing their genitals. That is sexual assault. You bragged that you have sexually assaulted women. Do you understand that?”
Trump retreated to the self-serving and unpersuasive line he first adopted on Friday night, when he responded to the Post story in a short video. “No, I didn’t say that at all,” he said to Cooper. “I don’t think you understood what was—this was locker-room talk. I’m not proud of it. I apologize to my family. I apologize to the American people. Certainly I’m not proud of it. But this is locker-room talk.” Then Trump tried to change the subject to ISIS “chopping off heads” and “drowning people in steel cages.” Cooper, to his credit, didn’t let him off so easy. Three times, he interrupted Trump and asked him if he had actually done the things he boasted about on the recording. Twice, Trump tried to brush Cooper off. Finally, he said, “No, I have not.”
Trump’s immediate fate may well depend on the truth of that answer and on whether anything else surfaces in the coming days that further throws it into question. On Sunday, after issuing this blanket denial, he went on to throw everything he could at his opponent and her spouse. “There’s never been anybody in the history of politics in this nation that’s been so abusive to women,” Trump said of Bill Clinton. Then he went on, “Hillary Clinton attacked those same women and attacked them viciously. Four of them are here tonight.” He also claimed that his opponent had no right to criticize him, saying, “I think it’s disgraceful, and I think she should be ashamed of herself, if you want to know the truth.”
Clinton, wisely, declined to get into the specifics of these charges and countercharges. Instead, she kept the focus on Trump’s character, pressing the compelling argument that it should disqualify him from the Presidency. Afforded the opportunity to comment on the Trump video, Clinton said, “I think it’s clear to anyone who heard it that it represents exactly who he is. Because we’ve seen this throughout the campaign. We have seen him insult women. We’ve seen him rate women on their appearance, ranking them from one to ten. We’ve seen him embarrass women on TV and on Twitter. We saw him after the first debate spend nearly a week denigrating a former Miss Universe in the harshest, most personal terms. So, yes, this is who Donald Trump is.”
Asked to respond to Trump’s allegations about her and her husband, Clinton demurred. “When I hear something like that,” she said, “I am reminded of what my friend, Michelle Obama, advised us all: When they go low, you go high.” Then Clinton pivoted to criticizing Trump for his attacks on the Khan family, Judge Gonzalo Curiel, a disabled reporter, and President Obama. “He owes the President an apology, he owes our country an apology, and he needs to take responsibility for his actions and his words,” she said.
That was just the opening. The rest of the debate, inevitably, was a bit of an anticlimax. Trump, as he did at the first debate, trotted out a series of false statements, including the claim that he opposed the Iraq war. In what may well have been another first for Presidential debates, he also slapped down one of the policy prescriptions of his own running mate, when he said that he disagreed with Mike Pence’s call for U.S. military action against the Assad regime in Syria. Unlike in the first debate, though, Trump managed to keep his delivery relatively calm. He also got off some zingers, the best of which came when Clinton brought up Abraham Lincoln to justify a statement she’d made, recently revealed by WikiLeaks, that politicians sometimes need to adopt different public and private positions on issues. “Honest Abe never lied,” Trump quipped. “That’s the difference between Abe Lincoln and you.”
Clinton, as always, was informed and articulate. She delivered a cogent defense of, among other things, progressive taxation, religious freedom, and the principle of universal access to health care. And, just as in the first debate, the Democratic candidate did an effective job of calling out Trump for his bigotry and divisiveness. But the questioning, from Cooper and ABC News’s Martha Raddatz, was tougher than it was in the first debate, and it put Clinton on the defensive about the private e-mail server she used as Secretary of State and her speeches to Wall Street—two topics that have dogged her campaign.
Clinton’s best moment may have come after a Muslim-American woman named Gorbah Hamed asked the candidates how they would “help people like me deal with the consequences of being labelled as a threat to the country after the election is over?” In his answer, Trump called Islamophobia “a shame,” but then went on to display some of it, saying Muslims needed to report to the authorities “when they see something going on.” (Evidently, Trump had ignored, or failed to take in, the fact that the father of Ahmad Khan Rahami, the suspect in the recent explosions in Chelsea and New Jersey, told the F.B.I. that he suspected his son was a jihadi.)
Clinton’s response to Hamed was very different. After walking over to Hamed, she told her how she had met with many American Muslims and “heard how important it is for them to feel that they are wanted and included and part of our country, part of our homeland security, and that’s what I want to see.” Clinton went on, “We are not at war with Islam. And it is a mistake, and it plays into the hands of the terrorists, to act as though we are. So I want a country where citizens like you and your family are just as welcome as anyone else.”
That was a high point in what was otherwise not an uplifting occasion. In fact, most of the night was about the lowest of the low. But then, bizarrely, at the very end, an audience member asked the two candidates if they had anything positive to say about each other. Clinton replied, “Look, I respect his children. His children are incredibly able and devoted, and I think that says a lot about Donald.” Trump accepted Clinton’s words as “a nice compliment,” and added, “I will say this about Hillary. She doesn’t quit. She doesn’t give up. I respect that. I tell it like it is. She’s a fighter.”
After all the rancorous vitriol that had gone before, what were we to make of that?
More on the debate: Amy Davidson on Trump’s dictatorial threat, and Benjamin Wallace-Wells on how she will handle his supporters.
Shortly before the second Presidential debate began, on Sunday night, John Podhoretz, the editor of Commentary and a New York Post columnist, remarked on Twitter that this was “the weirdest single moment in modern American political history.” Some people who lived through Watergate, or the farcical impeachment of Bill Clinton, might argue with that statement, but one thing can be said without fear of contradiction: this was the darkest and nastiest Presidential debate in modern history.
The debate took place two days after the release of a 2005 video in which Trump could be heard boasting about groping and assaulting women. The video had prompted droves of Trump’s fellow-Republicans to desert him, and, in the lead-up to Sunday’s debate, many people were suggesting that Trump might be forced out the Presidential race. By the end of the night, however, the television pundits were proclaiming that Trump had probably done well enough to fight on—at least until his campaign is hit with some other shocker.
But what really lingered from the debate, which took place at Washington University, in St. Louis, was the sense of the depths to which this election has sunk. To be sure, there were some substantive exchanges about taxes, health care, and foreign policy. But these discussions were almost a sideshow. From the moment on Friday afternoon when the Washington Post published its story about the 2005 video, Sunday’s affair was inevitably going to be the “Grab them by the pussy” debate.
Trump, as is his wont, was on the offensive from the start. Eschewing the advice of the Republican strategist Karl Rove and others, who had urged Trump to adopt a contrite stance and present himself as a change agent for Washington, Trump did what he has clearly been aching to do for months: he tried to change the subject to Bill Clinton. Just before he took the debate stage, Trump held a surprise press conference alongside three women—Juanita Broaddrick, Paula Jones, and Kathleen Willey—who have levelled sexual-assault allegations against the former President that date back decades and have been vigorously contested. Also present was a woman named Kathy Shelton, who was raped when she was twelve years old, and whose assailant was assigned a young lawyer named Hillary Clinton to help defend him in court.
During the debate itself, the four women were sitting in the audience, guests of the Trump campaign. After an initial question from an audience member—the debate had been billed as a town hall—CNN’s Anderson Cooper, one of the two moderators, got right to the point, saying, “Mr. Trump, about the tape that was released on Friday . . . you called what you said locker-room banter. You described kissing women without consent, grabbing their genitals. That is sexual assault. You bragged that you have sexually assaulted women. Do you understand that?”
Trump retreated to the self-serving and unpersuasive line he first adopted on Friday night, when he responded to the Post story in a short video. “No, I didn’t say that at all,” he said to Cooper. “I don’t think you understood what was—this was locker-room talk. I’m not proud of it. I apologize to my family. I apologize to the American people. Certainly I’m not proud of it. But this is locker-room talk.” Then Trump tried to change the subject to ISIS “chopping off heads” and “drowning people in steel cages.” Cooper, to his credit, didn’t let him off so easy. Three times, he interrupted Trump and asked him if he had actually done the things he boasted about on the recording. Twice, Trump tried to brush Cooper off. Finally, he said, “No, I have not.”
Trump’s immediate fate may well depend on the truth of that answer and on whether anything else surfaces in the coming days that further throws it into question. On Sunday, after issuing this blanket denial, he went on to throw everything he could at his opponent and her spouse. “There’s never been anybody in the history of politics in this nation that’s been so abusive to women,” Trump said of Bill Clinton. Then he went on, “Hillary Clinton attacked those same women and attacked them viciously. Four of them are here tonight.” He also claimed that his opponent had no right to criticize him, saying, “I think it’s disgraceful, and I think she should be ashamed of herself, if you want to know the truth.”
Clinton, wisely, declined to get into the specifics of these charges and countercharges. Instead, she kept the focus on Trump’s character, pressing the compelling argument that it should disqualify him from the Presidency. Afforded the opportunity to comment on the Trump video, Clinton said, “I think it’s clear to anyone who heard it that it represents exactly who he is. Because we’ve seen this throughout the campaign. We have seen him insult women. We’ve seen him rate women on their appearance, ranking them from one to ten. We’ve seen him embarrass women on TV and on Twitter. We saw him after the first debate spend nearly a week denigrating a former Miss Universe in the harshest, most personal terms. So, yes, this is who Donald Trump is.”
Asked to respond to Trump’s allegations about her and her husband, Clinton demurred. “When I hear something like that,” she said, “I am reminded of what my friend, Michelle Obama, advised us all: When they go low, you go high.” Then Clinton pivoted to criticizing Trump for his attacks on the Khan family, Judge Gonzalo Curiel, a disabled reporter, and President Obama. “He owes the President an apology, he owes our country an apology, and he needs to take responsibility for his actions and his words,” she said.
That was just the opening. The rest of the debate, inevitably, was a bit of an anticlimax. Trump, as he did at the first debate, trotted out a series of false statements, including the claim that he opposed the Iraq war. In what may well have been another first for Presidential debates, he also slapped down one of the policy prescriptions of his own running mate, when he said that he disagreed with Mike Pence’s call for U.S. military action against the Assad regime in Syria. Unlike in the first debate, though, Trump managed to keep his delivery relatively calm. He also got off some zingers, the best of which came when Clinton brought up Abraham Lincoln to justify a statement she’d made, recently revealed by WikiLeaks, that politicians sometimes need to adopt different public and private positions on issues. “Honest Abe never lied,” Trump quipped. “That’s the difference between Abe Lincoln and you.”
Clinton, as always, was informed and articulate. She delivered a cogent defense of, among other things, progressive taxation, religious freedom, and the principle of universal access to health care. And, just as in the first debate, the Democratic candidate did an effective job of calling out Trump for his bigotry and divisiveness. But the questioning, from Cooper and ABC News’s Martha Raddatz, was tougher than it was in the first debate, and it put Clinton on the defensive about the private e-mail server she used as Secretary of State and her speeches to Wall Street—two topics that have dogged her campaign.
Clinton’s best moment may have come after a Muslim-American woman named Gorbah Hamed asked the candidates how they would “help people like me deal with the consequences of being labelled as a threat to the country after the election is over?” In his answer, Trump called Islamophobia “a shame,” but then went on to display some of it, saying Muslims needed to report to the authorities “when they see something going on.” (Evidently, Trump had ignored, or failed to take in, the fact that the father of Ahmad Khan Rahami, the suspect in the recent explosions in Chelsea and New Jersey, told the F.B.I. that he suspected his son was a jihadi.)
Clinton’s response to Hamed was very different. After walking over to Hamed, she told her how she had met with many American Muslims and “heard how important it is for them to feel that they are wanted and included and part of our country, part of our homeland security, and that’s what I want to see.” Clinton went on, “We are not at war with Islam. And it is a mistake, and it plays into the hands of the terrorists, to act as though we are. So I want a country where citizens like you and your family are just as welcome as anyone else.”
That was a high point in what was otherwise not an uplifting occasion. In fact, most of the night was about the lowest of the low. But then, bizarrely, at the very end, an audience member asked the two candidates if they had anything positive to say about each other. Clinton replied, “Look, I respect his children. His children are incredibly able and devoted, and I think that says a lot about Donald.” Trump accepted Clinton’s words as “a nice compliment,” and added, “I will say this about Hillary. She doesn’t quit. She doesn’t give up. I respect that. I tell it like it is. She’s a fighter.”
After all the rancorous vitriol that had gone before, what were we to make of that?
More on the debate: Amy Davidson on Trump’s dictatorial threat, and Benjamin Wallace-Wells on how she will handle his supporters.
