TRUMPS PICKETT’S CHARGE

Summary: Donald Trump crashed and burned last night. If his dreadful performance in his first one-on-one debate with Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton was intended to sway undecided voters, it did nothing but demonstrate not only his woeful lack of preparation, but also it gave those undecided voters a glimpse into the character flaws that make him totally unfit to be dogcatcher, let alone President of the United States.

Indeed, Trump’s poor performance not only demonstrated the truth of the so-called 7 Ps of military readiness: Proper Preparation and Practice Prevent Piss Poor Performance, but it also demonstrated what has been a fundamental truth about this election cycle that many had been reluctant to recognize: that there exists a profound moral imperative to vote for Hillary Clinton. Indeed, so powerful is this moral imperative that it can be described as a Kantian categorical imperative. Morals and patriotism have flowed into one common channel that demand are unequivocal support of Hillary Rodham Clinton for the presidency of the United States.

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Donald Trump went out to debate Hillary Clinton at Hofstra University last night. He might have done his campaign better service had he fabricated some excuse to stay away.

Instead, The Donald crashed and burned. Or, to use what might be under these circumstances a more felicitous metaphor, Donald Trump’s debate performance last night was akin to George Pickett’s ill-fated charge against the Union lines on Cemetery Ridge at the battle of Gettysburg on July 3, 1863.

Pickett’s Charge, to give it its due capital letters, has been described as “the high water mark of the Confederacy.” And like all high water marks, the tide can do nothing but ebb after that. Though the Confederacy had nearly 2 years to live after Pickett’s Charge, those two years or nothing more than the ill-fated storm-born child’s death agonies.

Of course, when George Pickett’s troops stepped out across the three quarters of a mile that separated their lines from those of the Union forces whom Robert Lee could never bring himself to call “the enemy,” preferring instead the epithet “those people,” they stepped out in confidence, with their battle banners held time and their bands blaring “Dixie.”

Because the boys in butternut and gray just knew that they would carry all before them. Things went a little differently. They stepped out across those three quarters of a mile and they were slaughtered. When it was all over, and the rebel remnants had retreated back to the safety of Southern lines, there was very little left. In fact, Pickett’s division had been so badly chewed up that when Robert Lee asked after it, George Pickett told him, in tones of bitterness and anguish, “General Lee, I have no division.” George Pickett’s anguished words that day could have served as one of the many epitaphs for the storm-born Southern Confederacy.

Last night, Donald Trump stepped out to what he knew would be a great victory over Hillary Clinton. He expected to win, and to win bigly. He expected to charge across the stage and reduce the quondam Secretary of State to a blubbering mound of Jell-O. All the expectations were that he would do exactly that. The bar had been set so low that all Donald Trump had to do was appear and, for one brief glimmering moment, look presidential on stage. Because the bar was set correspondingly high for Hillary Clinton, it was felt that if Donald Trump did not make an utter fool of himself during the debate, it would be easy for his camp to spin his debate performance as a victory.

Yet, like Pickett’s division charging against the Union lines at Cemetery Ridge, Trump’s woeful lack of preparation proved his undoing. Despite the lowness of the bar and the general grade-on-a-curve mentality of the news media, The Donald was not even able to surmount the low bar. Though he started strong, by the 25th minute he was plainly out of energy, he was taking Hillary’s bait, and he was falling into the trap of imagining that the same kind of performance that enabled him to lay away his 16 Republican competitors in the primary will avail him against Hillary Clinton.

But Hillary Clinton is a far more skillful debater. She knew how to make The Donald look like the fool he is, and more importantly, she knew how to bait him and force him to make a fool of himself, to humiliate himself, on national television in front of millions of viewers. Add to that his inability to control his various physical tics (which lends credence to the speculation that Trump’s quack doctor has the man hooked on either cocaine or some type of amphetamine-based stimulant) made The Donald come across like an insincere simulacrum of Richard Nixon debating John F. Kennedy.

Either way, notwithstanding the efforts of conservatives to spin Trump’s performance as some kind of victory, most reasonable Americans have weighed his debate showing in the balance and found it absolutely wanting. Trump himself must have known by the end of the evening that he had turned in a subpar performance, that like Pickett’s division hurling itself against the Union lines on Cemetery Ridge, his effort had come up short. Trump, scorning preparation, failed to realize what amyone who has been in or near the American military understands: Proper Preparation and Practice Prevent Piss Poor Performance.

And indeed, Trump’s disappointment in his performance manifested itself in the usual Trumpian fashion. Since The Donald seems constitutionally unable to accept any kind of personal responsibility for his performance, let alone reflect on it, his immediate spin as he left the debate venue was to complain about the microphone (!), as if the microphone itself had been a Democratic operative deliberately embedded in the operation with specific instructions to make The Donald look bad.

Moreover, this morning, The Donald doubled down on his churlish remarks, repeating, for roughly the nth time, a whole series of boorish and sexist remarks about former Miss Universe Alicia Machado, whom Trump had referred to as “Miss Piggy,” and “Miss Housekeeper,” among other things, while body shaming what is to all accounts a beautiful and self-possessed woman with far more self-awareness than The Donald can ever hope to possess. In short, the Donald demonstrated and lived down to every negative stereotype that Southerners have about New York in general and the borough of Brooklyn in particular. He was rude, crude, and utterly misogynistic.

And if the kindest thing we can say about Donald Trump is that neither Robert Lee nor George Pickett would ever have spoken of, let alone addressed, a woman with such scorn and disrespect, then we are necessarily setting the bar very, very low. Hillary Clinton didn’t need to be particularly brilliant, all she needed to be was prepared. That she in fact was brilliant, that she, like Vladimir Putin, knows how to play The Donald like a Stradivarius, made her victory all the sweeter and more inevitable. Her epic throwing of shade in his direction, when he attempted to downplay the importance of preparation and she came back saying that she was “prepared to be President,” will go down in the history of presidential debates. It was a moment when the bully realized he was being beaten by a girl(!).

But if anything The Donald can do, Hillary can do better (by orders of magnitude) we must candidly acknowledge that there is a moral dimension to the selection unlike that of any election in this country since perhaps 1860.

Now Democrats are often chary of seeing in the fever swamps of politics any kind of moral dimension whatsoever. As Tony Blair so infamously put it, “we don’t do God.” Yet, even if we don’t do God, we can and very much must do morality.

Because voting for Hillary Clinton isn’t just a political choice. In this election, in which the future not only of democracy in America, but of democracy and of America itself is on the line, an election fraught with existential peril, voting for Hillary Clinton is what Immanuel Kant would have called categorical imperative.

As new facts have emerged about Donald Trump, coming forth in a steady drip-drip-drip of unsavoriness, we must take a look, even at the acknowledged risk of imperiling our souls, into what Friedrich Nietzsche called the abyss, and hope to God the abyss doesn’t stare back.

Because the abyss that is Donald Trump offers for us a whole series of what we might, in charity, call non-recommending issues.

Secretary Clinton touched on some of them last night.

Trump’s refusal to disclose his tax returns was compounded last night by his Freudian admission that he does not in fact pay taxes because he’s “smart.” Aside from being a very good way to lose the middle class, which does pay the taxes that Donald Trump and his fellow One Percenters are at pains to avoid and evade, it also makes another point: that Donald Trump doesn’t believe enough in America to support it with his taxes. And, as the Washington Post’s David Fahrenthold has uncovered, Trump may have engaged in the kind of systematic tax evasion and abuse that brought down Vice President Spiro Agnew in 1973. The slow, steady, drip-drip-drip of information about Trump’s taxes is revealing a profound unsavoriness in his character.

Trumps misogyny and sexism were also on full display last night as he attempted to play the alpha male against a woman who is his better in every conceivable respect. His abuse of Alicia Machado, on which we have already touched, on which he doubled down again this morning, along with his abuse of Rosie O’Donnell and the Sec. Clinton herself, displays a depth of moral depravity that no American should tolerate. Not in the board room, not in the bedroom, and certainly not in the White House.

The final bit of evidence of Trump’s moral unfitness comes of course in his expressions of disloyalty to the United States. The Donald’s whiny complaints about the cost of our astonishingly successful Atlantic alliance, and his pro-Russian policy positions, to say nothing of his bromance with the thuggish Vladimir Putin, who does what Trump would like to do, but can’t get away with in this country, namely assassinating journalists and critics of his regime, ought to lead any remotely patriotic American to turn away from The Donald in horror.

Because the Donald is in fact a special kind of horrible. Aside from being unprepared and imagining that he can wing it when all the other kids in the class went ahead and did their homework, The Donald’s positions, to the extent they extend any deeper than mindless, redeless platitudes, display an extent of disloyalty to this country not seen since Aaron Burr opposed Thomas Jefferson for the presidency. Indeed, the subsequent trajectory of Aaron Burr’s career, which included a planned filibustering expedition against Mexico, plans to create an empire in Louisiana, and finally, a treason trial, is worth contemplating because we can see similar delusions of grandeur in Donald Trump.

By contrast, Hillary Rodham Clinton is a known quantity. She’s not particularly charismatic, but she is methodical, she’s careful, she is a coalition-builder in that uniquely feminine way that has not been tried and found wanting, but instead has been found difficult and left untried, (pace, G.K. Chesterton), and she knows what it is to have been betrayed and to have taken the ultimate revenge of forgiving her betrayer. A woman who can do that is a kind of tough that Donald Trump can never hope to emulate.

So, for a thousand policy reasons, Hillary Clinton deserves the nod. But beyond that, Hillary Clinton is the only candidate for whom there is an unanswerable moral case to be made. We know the future of the American experiment in self-government is in grave jeopardy. Donald Trump claims that only he can save this country. But since Donald Trump is so wrapped up in lies, Nazi tactics, and skating much too close to Russia (against which Rudyard Kipling so famously warned against making any truce: “make ye no truce with Adam-zad, the Bear that walks like a man!”), we cannot run the risk of submitting to his ministrations.

There is absolutely no moral case to be made for electing Donald Trump so much as dogcatcher. The best place for Donald Trump is in Guantánamo, with the other enemies of the People.

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PAUL S MARCHAND is an attorney who lives and practices in Cathedral City, California, where he spent two terms on the city Council. He has been a supporter of Hillary Clinton since she announced for president, he despises Donald Trump, and he expects, should Trump be victorious, to share the fate of Anna Politovskaya and of Alexander Litvinenko, who were assassinated on direct orders from Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin because they dared speak ill of the thuggish regime in Russia.