An ugly campaign, condensed into one debate

“Debate” is an iffy word for an exercise in which candidates are prompted by moderators to dole out their stump speeches bit by bit under hot lights while a clock counts the seconds and every quip and jab and stumble is used to keep score and proclaim a “winner.”

But when just one candidate is serious and the other is a vacuous bully, the term loses all meaning.

Monday night’s confrontation between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton was a spectacle, for sure: the sheer reality-TV hugeness of it, the Super Bowl audience of tens of millions. “Debate of the Century,” said The Drudge Report. “America on the Brink,” said The Huffington Post. For once, the hype may have been about right, given the tightness of the polls and the nearness of the election.

There was a fundamental asymmetry to the exercise, because of the awful truth that one of the participants had nothing truthful to offer. But seeing them on the same stage distilled exactly who they have been throughout this campaign.

Standing at the lectern, interrupting and shouting, playing the invisible accordion with his open hands, filibustering, tossing his word salads — jobs and terrorism and Nafta and China and everything is terrible — Mr. Trump said a lot. But as the debate wore on, he struggled to contend with an opponent who was much more poised and prepared than any of the Republicans he faced in the primaries.

Ninety minutes was never going to be enough time for Mr. Trump to redeem his candidacy, even if by some miracle he had wanted to, if he had suddenly developed a coherent set of policies and principles, an agenda against which Mrs. Clinton’s proposals could be weighed and reviewed, and a baseline level of decency.

The moderator, Lester Holt of NBC News, announced the preset themes of “achieving prosperity,” “America’s direction” and “securing America,” then meekly retreated into silence as Mr. Trump went on the attack, blaming Mrs. Clinton for ISIS and joblessness and globalization, depicting the country as a living hell for black Americans, a land beset by illegal immigrants and gangs with guns, with police officers afraid to stop them. “It’s all sound bites,” he said at one point, meaning to disparage Mrs. Clinton, but unwittingly describing the emptiness of his own words.

Depending on how your lenses are polarized, Mr. Trump met/exceeded/ failed to meet expectations, which were low to begin with. He has lied compulsively since he entered the race, and he was caught again on Monday night with his pants on fire (repeating, among other lies, his slander that Mrs. Clinton invented the birther slur against President Obama). But anything short of dropping his pants in the Hofstra University audi- torium would still have left him with the support of a large portion of the American electorate.

Mrs. Clinton also met/exceeded/ failed to meet expectations, which were different for her. She had to have just enough levity, mixed with substance, to be stern but not shrill, funny but not flippant, smart but not pedantic, able to stand up to bullying. On balance, she pulled it off, swatting his attacks aside and confidently delivering her own criticisms from higher, firmer ground.

A more appealing and competent set of primary candidates might have stopped this. A responsible Republican Party, mindful of the national interest, not obsessed with thwarting President Obama, might have stopped it. In a better political era, both parties — not just the Democrats — would have nominated qualified candidates who could answer Americans’ concerns about terrorism and war, climate and the economy, immigration and racial healing, education and public safety.

But not this year. The Republican field was winnowed to the worst of the worst. Which gave the debate its strange, potentially tragic dimension. It’s absurd that the fate of the race, and the future of the nation, might carom this way or that based on a 90-minute television ritual so tainted by falsehoods.