Presidential debate
‘Braggadocious’ Trump miraculously hits new lows
What? He said what? Did I hear that right? The Monday Clinton-Trump debate outpaced my capacity for wonder. It was like being a carsick kid on a family vacation and the nausea distracting from one’s first sight of the Rockies. Yes, Mount Robson amazing but can we pull over so I can expel?
It was 90 minutes of weirdness spikes, like a printout of a heart monitor but a shocked heart, a distended explosive heart. There was Hillary Clinton, sane, and there was Donald Trump looking like a Mobster, a baggy Tony Soprano pursing his mouth as though he were testing a dodgy macadamia nut.
And of course the weird sniffing. Just blow it or wipe it, people will understand. But that’s a normal thought, and what came over me during the debate was a powerful sense of the American abnormal.
My note-taking faded to nothing except the dire notation “Oct. 9, 19” for the next two debates. Three times will I sit in a room and be unable to list Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump answers a question during the presidential debate with Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton at Hofstra University in Hempstead, N.Y., Monday. lunacy spikes coming at me too thick and fast to record. Three times will I think Trump has reached his lowest point and be serially proved wrong.
The weirdest moments? It’s a greatest hits compilation. Did the Star’s Daniel Dale, midway through his Trump-said-34false-things list lose the will to live?
It could have been Trump appearing to call on China to invade North Korea, or his listing of faulty American airports, or saying his Palm Beach club allowed “Mooz-lims” as evidence of his fight against racism. There was his “I have a winning temperament.” Or his response when Clinton referred to his calling a beauty contestant “Miss Piggy” for gaining weight and “Miss Housekeeping” because she was Latina. “Where did you find that?” he said angrily.
There is nothing unfindable in this era, except for Trump’s tax returns, which he will have to release.
Clinton’s recital of reasons why he might not wish to was the most insulting thing he has ever heard from a woman, particularly in public, and the predictions that Trump would be very angry the next day at his shaming were accurate.
Tuesday he re-stated his fatattack on beauty contestant Alicia Machado, saying, “She gained a massive amount of weight,” an unwise remark in a nation where obesity is a national health problem. Trump is himself overweight, which may be why he lashes out at women but not men.
I won’t even mention Trump’s hair, which looked like the tuft on an ear of corn or carefully combed dryer lint or a mullet turned backward on the head, teased forward and sliced. Trump has bangs. There, I mentioned it.
It’s very odd how often U.S. candidates speak incoherently. George W. Bush was famous for it, and he won. Trump has a choppy command of English: “a very against-police judge,” “And the reason I say that is not in a braggadocious way.” “Somebody sitting on their bed that weighs 400 lbs.” What?
Trump became Sarah Palin, sending out disconnected thoughts and proper names that he plucks from a faded memory cloud. Why mention Gen. Douglas MacArthur and Rosie O’Donnell? Why use Sean Hannity as a mantra?
And then there’s the eternal Laura Norder, as they say, whom Trump lavishly praised in code.
But no, the lowest point was his threatening to abandon a defence treaty with Japan. Clinton, for the first time genuinely alarmed, had to reassure watching U.S. allies that America’s “word is good.”
At this I recoiled. Clinton was taking time out to reassure the rest of the world that the U.S. had not become a liar and would not betray a nation with which it made peace after bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
Suddenly the Allies’ great victory in the Second World War was in the air again. Risking Godwin’s Law, U.S. journalist Philip Gourevitch did something great on debate night. He quoted Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi from his 1986 book, The Drowned and the Saved, about how power was wielded in the Nazi death camps.
“For us to speak with the young becomes ever more difficult,” Levi wrote.
“We have collectively witnessed a fundamental, unexpected event. It took place in the teeth of all forecasts; it happened in Europe; an entire civilized people ... followed a buffoon whose figure today inspires laughter, and yet Adolf Hitler was obeyed. It happened, therefore it can happen again.”
If Trump’s fingers approach the nuclear button, we are done.