The Second Presidential Debate and Political Pessimism

By Zack Boehm on October 10, 2016

Before Sunday night’s debate, I think I was still able to convince myself that this election hadn’t yet monopolized the whole of my psychic and emotional energy. As calamitous and humiliating, as conflagratory and degrading, as upsetting and disturbing and relentlessly traumatic as the whole affair had been, I still felt reasonably capable of managing the psychological strain. Even after the leak of the really, authentically villainous #TrumpTape, as the last brittle wheels of the Trump Train were wrenched off by the candidate’s own unfeeling, untrammeled misogyny, some tiny Pollyannaish part of me still felt like all the nastiness could be laughed off. The entire process had reached such soaring levels of cartoonish malformed inanity that it felt comfortable to greet every increasingly crazy news item with a smug eye roll and a scroll through Twitter to see who could best parlay our latest national shame into a pithy one-liner.

Before Sunday night’s debate, it still felt okay to make light of our collective misfortune. To a certain extent, how could we not? To be befuddled and amused by some of the things that have transpired throughout the course of the last year seems to be a perfectly appropriate response. People and institutions that had long teetered on the edge of unconscious self-parody had finally taken the plunge into full on masochistic mockery. And much of it was hilarious.

Before Sunday night’s debate, and the 48 blisteringly insane hours that preceded it, things were bad. In fact, things were historically, harrowingly awful. But at least it felt temporary. At least it felt like come November 8th, the screwy cosmos would click back into place and some kind of sanity, or, at the very least, familiarity, would be restored. The unflinching optimist could even argue that, yes, this was a massive and unsettling aberration, but it was one that would be quickly and tidily remedied by the same hallowed systems that have kept this country running (with a few… significant hiccups) for 240 years.

cbsnews.com

Before Sunday night’s debate, it felt like we’d come out of this election battered, bruised, and chastened, but fundamentally unthreatened. After Sunday night’s debate, that has become much less certain.

Nearly everyone with a keyboard, a copywriter’s salary, and a pulse has weighed in on the kaleidoscopic cluster bomb that was the second Presidential Debate. Folks far smarter, and with a far richer historical perspective than me have counted the ways that Trump, ever intrepid in exploring the limits of political malignity, did his best to delegitimize the entire American political apparatus. Hemorrhaging support among the republican establishment after the release of the 2005 tapes wherein he boasted about committing sexual assault, Trump was finally able to discard the façade (it didn’t fit him at all anyway) and appeal directly to his base.

And he played all the hits. He answered pointed questions about his 2005 remarks with characteristically vacuous non sequiturs about defeating ISIS. He answered a young Muslim woman’s question about curbing Islamophobia by recirculating the same tired, toxic, and baseless Islamophobic claims that he’s been recklessly spewing for years. He shadowed Hillary Clinton across the stage, brooding over her like the weirdest man-child pledge at a particularly trash frat party, before accusing her of having “tremendous hate in her heart.” He, and this part had me yelping in disbelief, continued his obsequies overtures to Putin’s Russia while in the process of OPENLY AND EXPLICITLY contradicting his running mate, Mike Pence, regarding American intervention in Syria. When pressed about this basic, glaring dissonance by the moderators, Trump said that he and Pence “hadn’t spoken” and that he “disagrees” with Pence’s hardline stance against Russian aggression (what must the two men talk about if in three months they haven’t broached the subject of the most pressing contemporary humanitarian crisis? My guess is they haven’t had a real life conversation that hasn’t been on the stump or in front of a camera).

qz.com

While this was all nauseating and haunting and objectively terrifying, the nadir of the night came when, after upbraiding Clinton with the same sterling email arguments that have so far won him a double-digit deficit in national polls, Trump vowed that, if he wins in November, he will assign a special prosecutor to investigate Clinton’s handling of her emails. When Clinton responded that we were all fortunate that someone of Trump’s capricious temperament is not in charge of our nation’s laws, Trump quipped “yeah, cause you’d be in jail.”

Ignoring the fact that (shockingly) Trump is totally oblivious to the mechanics of special prosecution, the suggestion that he would use his executive power to imprison a political adversary should horrify anyone with legitimate affection for American democracy. As many have already pointed out, Trump has been desecrating norms of political civility throughout his campaign, but to threaten a political opponent with imprisonment during a nationally televised debate has the potential to be gravely destabilizing. What separates the United States from the tinpot, strongman autocracies that Trump has expressed such a fondness for is the promise of a peaceful transition of powers. To threaten that pillar of our democracy is to threaten the entire edifice. Trump has made vague intimations in the past about how a Clinton win would signal a rigged election, and while that sort of rhetoric is irresponsible and damaging to the legitimacy of our institutions, it pales in comparison to what Trump did on stage Sunday night.

Watching that in the moment, seeing this fulminating bully thrust his pointed finger at Clinton and promise her that she would be the subject of concerted persecution by the American judicial system if she loses in November, watching a candidate for President of the United States of America promise categorically to wield the power of the state against his nemeses (of which there would be many), I thought it was over. I thought that he’d finally and mercifully nailed shut his own coffin. I was sure that, after praising autocrats for months and then pledging, plainly, to rule like one, the American media would finally and unequivocally rule him unfit to serve as President of the world’s greatest ever experiment in democracy. But then, after the debate, CNN cut to Jake Tapper, who judged that if he had to pick a winner, he’d probably give it to Trump on points.

denverpost.com

After Sunday night’s debate, I’m worried that Trump has actually fundamentally changed the way we talk and think about American politics. And I fear that it won’t be so easily remedied.

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