But worse even than that, as much as Donald Trump tried to present a more disciplined image of himself as a competent campaigner, his campaign appears to have targeted the wrong Clinton. Bill Clinton, the target of Trump’s hypocritical scorn, is not actually running for president of the United States. Trump’s effort to target the victimized spouse and to blame that victimized spouse for her husband’s alleged infidelities, together with his bizarre physical “manifestations” during the debate, can be regarded as nothing less than a master class in sexist bullying.
At all events, if Donald Trump thought that last night would reverse the irreversible decline of his campaign, he learned that Karl Marx was right to observe that history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.
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Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton took the stage last night for their second debate. To any reasonable person watching the performance, Karl Marx’s comment from The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon: “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.”
Trump’s farcical performance last night managed to veer unsteadily between grotesque physical bullying and creepy banana republic type threats. He prowled about the stage through most of the debate like a caged panther, standing at one point glowering behind Hillary as she responded to a question. As one woman commentator said later, if he had done that to her on the street, she would have had 911 ready to dial on her phone. He sniffled constantly, modeling the demeanor of a man intoxicated after having done several lines of cocaine in the green room.
And indeed, it is entirely possible that The Donald may have been under the influence of cocaine. His bluster, the misplaced self-confidence, and those endless, annoying, ostentatious, sniffles caused many observers of the debate, including former DNC chair Governor Howard Dean to wonder whether The Donald was not in fact coked off his ass
Moreover, cocaine as a drug is remarkable for making its users paranoid, horny... and impotent. Trump’s paranoia, and his dangerous, Putin-like penchant for vengeance were on ample display last night. His threat to appoint a special prosecutor and jail Hillary Clinton was the kind of thing that in normal circumstances we would expect from the dictator in some banana republics somewhere. Never did Donald Trump so resemble Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet as he did in that moment. Dictators imprison their political rivals; we do not expect, and are not disposed to tolerate, such behavior from an American presidential candidate.
And quite right, too! Though many of Trump’s supporters will insist that Trump “won” last night’s debate, spamming online polls to skew the results, his “victory,” such as it may have been, will prove, in the event, to be as illusory as the “victory” of Mike Pence in last week’s vice presidential debate. Pence’s “victory” was soon undone and overshadowed by the devastating revelations concerning The Donald himself, which grabbed the American public’s metaphorical pussy, and haven’t let go. Already, new revelations of further deplorable sexual misconduct have begun to surface, with further adverse effects upon The Donald’s campaign.
Last night, The Donald had a chance to reverse, or at least arrest temporarily, the irreversible decline of his campaign. Yet through most of the ninety minutes of what CBS’s Bob Schieffer has characterized as one of the most “disgraceful” debates in history, Trump was charging willy-nilly around the stage campaigning against Bill Clinton, rather than against the actual Democratic candidate for president. In short, Donald the bully was pursuing the wrong Clinton.
Yet, with his physical “manifestations” on full display in front, as they say in the American South, “of God and everybody,” his creepy, fascistic threats, and his apparent inability or unwillingness to answer the questions put to him, The Donald managed to fling improvidently and incontinently away every single chance he had to use this debate to try to salvage his own campaign. Instead of coming across as presidential, a status he left by default to Hillary Clinton (who pulls it off so very much much better), The Donald came across as the sexist bully he is.
The Donald’s performance may have appealed to angry white men of a certain generation and level of educational attainment, but this election has ceased to be about angry white men of a certain generation and level of educational attainment. This election, more than any other in American history, is an election of color. The presidency of the United States will be decided by women, whom Trump is losing in droves, by communities of color, and by politically engaged queerfolk. Donald Trump’s nightmare voter in this election is an angry, motivated, fearful-of-Trump African-American lesbian.
In my analysis of the first presidential debate, I analogized it to George Pickett’s charge at Gettysburg, the so-called “high water mark of the Confederacy.” This debate I would analogize to a less known pair of battles, the first at Franklin, Tennessee in at the end of November, 1864, and the second before Nashville fifteen days later. At Franklin, the Confederate commander, Gen. John Bell Hood, angry at his own army, and determined to punish it for what he saw as it shortcomings, flung his Confederate troops against union general John M. Schofield’s superior forces. Schofield, who had been withdrawing upon Nashville, remained in possession of the field and continued his withdrawal. Fifteen days later, Hood, still angry, attacked the union fortifications around Nashville, and was decisively beaten. With the defeat at Nashville, the Confederate Army of Tennessee had ceased to exist as a viable fighting force. If Hood mortally wounded his army at Franklin, he would kill it two weeks later at Nashville. D. Eicher Longest Night: A Military History of the Civil War 775.
Trump, who now appears to have incontinently opened up a second front in his campaign by picking fights with his fellow Republicans, has managed to do for his campaign the same bad service that John Bell Hood, who was similarly notorious for his lack of impulse control, did for the dying Confederacy. If the debate first against Hillary Clinton mortally wounded his campaign, this debate may very well have killed it.
Of course, the postmortems may be premature. Trump may well be able to pull some semblance of a campaign back together, even in the face of the revelations of sexual misconduct which have dogged it in recent days. But that may be more of a miracle then can be imagined in the four weeks remaining of this campaign. The Donald would do well to remember the counsels of the Caroline divines, the Restoration theologians who set the Anglican faith on firm footings: “we sinners can pray for a miracle, but we cannot demand one.”
As the Trump campaign begins its endgame, it can be expected to go through the late stage death agonies common to all American political campaigns. Former McCain presidential campaign advisor Steve Schmidt has opined that the election is over; the vote for Hillary Clinton is constitutionally required, but is now virtually superfluous. Other Republican operatives have said much the same thing; only a miracle can save Donald Trump now.
Yet, the Hillary Clinton campaign cannot afford to become complacent. There is, of course, always the risk that WikiLeaks, on orders from the Kremlin, will try some new, outcome determinative, data leak, or that something equally catastrophic might happen. But, at this late date, the Clinton campaign can but press forward, adjuring it supporters to vote, phonebank, engage in aggressive GOTV, and work as if Hillary were not five points up, but three points down. The election, at this stage, is Hillary’s to lose, and we must not permit that to happen.
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PAUL S. MARCHAND, Esq. is an attorney who lives and practices law in Cathedral City, where he served for eight years as a member of the city Council. He would consider it a badge of honor to be on Donald Trump’s enemies list. As Pat Conroy put it in The Lords of Discipline, he is willing to lead a revolt in the mountains if Trump becomes president and make a general out of the first national guardsmen who brings him Donald trumps nuts in a mason jar. The views herein are Mr. Marchand’s own and should not be construed as legal advice.
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