WILL BILL LOSE IT FOR HILLARY?

The whole world thought that it would be game over for Donald Trump under the television lights in St Louis, Missouri, on Sunday night.

Surely the second presidential debate, dominated by reports about his overt sexism, would be an almost Biblical scene: an apocalyptic fizz of light and sound, a thunderous tumult of final defiance, then silence as his campaign died on live TV.

Well, not so fast. he has survived. With all the smart money stacked against him, ‘The Donald’ turned it around. The polls still say he’ll lose and lose badly in the election next month, but he’s not done yet.

his best hope is a massive failure of the pollsters — as we saw with the Brexit referendum — where millions of people who don’t normally vote drag themselves to the polls because here, at last, is a stand they want to make.

That way, just possibly, out of places where pollsters fear to tread could come a shock victory for Trump. I doubt it, but then, I doubted that he would get this far. So did we all. That’s the nature of Trumpism.

Damage

On Sunday night, like a cartoon character, he caught the main incoming bomb of the night, the bomb that could have set off a chain reaction, and calmly tossed it off the stage.

Yes, he had been foul about women on a leaked tape — but he offered an apology and a sharp rejoinder about his opponent hillary Clinton’s husband and his sexual peccadilloes: ‘If you look at Bill Clinton . . . mine are words. his was action.’

That was ‘ not right’, hillary spluttered, but then felt she had to move on to other subjects before any more damage was done.

Oh, dear. Sunday’s televised debate had been billed as the moment Mr Trump would finally be shamed into quitting the race. Some Republicans from his own party had even dreamed of replacing him, as if they could say ‘ only kidding’ about how the party nominated him to run for the White house, and that the American people would just vote for some replacement stuffed suit.

But, as George W. Bush would have said, they misunderestimated Donald Trump, and they misunderestimated the dynamic of this debate: it was not between a poor candidate and a good candidate, it was between two candidates who are, to many Americans, both utterly ghastly.

Take the abuse of women. Mr Trump has plenty of form, on videotape and off it. It will have felt to many Americans when he addressed the issue on Sunday as if he was, to put it mildly, insincere when he claimed on stage that ‘I have great respect for women’.

But Mrs Clinton cannot land the killer blow because her errant husband is such a big target for Trump to attack whenever the Republican is under fire for misogyny.

To underline that point, Mr Trump brought a guest to the debate — and had her speak at a press conference before it.

‘Actions speak louder than words,’ said Juanita Broaddrick, who claims Bill Clinton raped her in 1978. ‘Mr Trump may have said some bad words, but Bill Clinton raped me and hillary Clinton threatened me.’

Yes, Bill Clinton denied this and other accusations and yes, the police declined to investigate. But who was it who said earlier this year that people who said they were survivors of sexual assault ‘had the right to be believed’? hillary Clinton herself. The same woman who once told a friend that Monica Lewinsky was a ‘narcissistic loony toon’. Not very sisterly.

Frankly, most Americans do not think Bill Clinton is a rapist any more than they think hillary Clinton conspired to cover up sexual incidents she knew to be crimes.

But the way the Clintons behaved down the years has allowed doubts to linger and fester. Ask yourself, would anyone believe such allegations about Michelle and Barack Obama? Not for a second.

So it is bad luck for hillary that she is just not in a position to use the ugliness of Donald Trump’s character against him to maximum effect.

But it’s not just the sex. Money is a problem for her, too.

In the hours before the debate, the WikiLeaks website leaked portions of paid speeches Mrs Clinton has made to the U.S. bank Goldman Sachs.

Again, there is nothing here that comes close the scandal and complexity of the Trump finances — he’s still refusing to release his tax returns — but why did she tell the millionaires of Goldman Sachs (in a speech she refused to publish) that: ‘There is such a bias against people who have led successful and/or complicated lives.’

That’s not how it must feel if you live in the depressed towns around the former steelworks of Pennsylvania, or impoverished rural Appalachia.

You have to understand why Trump’s people will genuinely back him to the last. For them, there is no other candidate, because all the other alternatives on the Republican side have more or less sold out — to big business, to special interests, to Wall Street. Trump is no less than a general leading an insurgent army. For the average Trump supporter, this is not politics: this is war. If they lose, they die.

If that sounds ludicrously melodramatic, it is worth noting that a survey last year found that the counties offering the strongest support for Trump in many states were also the counties where the male suicide rate was at its worst. his people are not just gloomy, they are downright desperate.

Grim

They are mostly white, and living in a nation where white people will be a minority by 2050. Plenty of white Americans are happy with that prospect but, for those at the bottom of the pile, it feels frightening.

Although they are often not as poor as — for instance — recent immigrants from Mexico who are making beds in Las Vegas hotels, they know their future is grim. There is nothing sunny about their prospects.

That is precisely why Donald Trump has been supported by so many voters, why he’s still in the race despite so many rows about women and taxes — and why Mrs Clinton felt, to many Democrats, like the worst possible candidate to put up against him.

Yes, Trump can be accused of being the biggest fake in the world, but how about her? Is she really any better?

In the debate on Sunday, she looked utterly at sea when she was asked about a leaked speech in which she had suggested that politicians needed to have ‘a public and a private position’ in order to get anything done. This sounded as though she was advocating dishonesty.

Apart from her husband’s track record with women, the problem for hillary is that many Americans — whether they are Left-wing Democrats or Rightwing Republicans — do not see her as having a real desire, a real fire in her belly, to rebuild anything. They think she likes things pretty much as they are.

Remember that a recently leaked email written by the former Pentagon chief General Colin Powell described Mrs Clinton as ‘ greedy’, with ‘unbridled ambition’ — and crucially ‘not transformational’.

Rancorous

So even when Donald Trump is losing ground, he strengthens his core support because people start to think hard about the reality of having another President Clinton.

Of course, the chances are that Mrs Clinton will get over the finishing line next month. Mr Trump did nothing on Sunday night to reach out to new supporters, certainly not to the college educated women of the suburbs who could sway the election in key states such as Florida and Ohio.

But this presidential battle has been a brutal, depressing struggle for a nation founded on the principle that it’s a cheerful, can- do kind of place.

My youngest daughter, Clara, is a U.S. citizen, because she was born there when I was the BBC’s North America editor.

Our family joke is that you can tell: she is the most smiling little person you could ever meet. Like many other Americans, she doesn’t understand irony or accept the idea of decline.

So what has this election given her and her generation? Certainly not hope.

Clara is a lucky American: she has a handwritten message from a president (he gave it to me when I interviewed him in 2009), which reads: ‘Dream big dreams, Barack Obama.’

As Sunday night’s debate underlined, that is not a message anyone would take away from this increasingly coarse and rancorous race.