The Sunday debate recalibrated the moribund Trump candidacy. It will not end this week. The stampede and groupthink calls for his resignation will ease. Trump might have lost the debate on points of detail, but by the end of hour one, he had won it on energy level and audacity.
No one has ever spoken so bluntly to Hillary Clinton in her 30 years in politics. The confrontation was long overdue. In an either/or race, Trump at least reminded the audience that he is running as a refutation of the status quo. Hillary still bores with the idea that Obama’s record is fine and her continuance of it will make things even better.
Trump, as the teenage delinquent, was at times, as expected, repetitive and brash. Hillary, as playground monitor, was characteristically off-putting, sanctimonious and disingenuous. At one point she foolishly explained her advocacy of being duplicitous by comparing herself to a supposed two-faced Abe Lincoln. Pulling Old Abe down to pull yourself up is not a good idea. Nor is referring voters to “fact-checking” at her own website! And there is something now surreal about Hillary’s promises to get tough with Putin, after she cooked up that ridiculous stunt of a red “reset” button in Geneva in 2009, while subsequently caving on almost everything the Russians wanted.
By the debate’s end, it was almost miraculously forgotten that hours earlier, Trump had been considered dead. That fact also translated into a Trump debate victory.
A leaked hot-mike tape from 11 years prior caught a married and near-60 Donald Trump talking dirty, in adolescent, misogynistic fashion — along with a celebrity scion of the Bush aristocracy.
The old, leaked recording revealed what most Americans knew already (from Trump’s own autobiographies, interviews, and past boasts): Trump is as crude as our crude culture, and sometimes as repellent in language and thought.
Whether he reified his braggadocio by grabbing women and sexually assaulting them through unwarranted touching — in the manner of former governor Arnold Schwarzenegger or past president Bill Clinton — remains to be seen from future hit-leaks. If Trump was talking sex trash as he approached 60, we can only imagine what the Clinton campaign will dig up from his randier 40s and 50s — especially after Trump did well enough in the debate, and in response to more Wikileaks damage to Hillary.
Why did his decade-old locker-room talk matter? A cruder and raunchier America of Miley Cyrus and Beyoncé is now far more sexually sensitive than was the staid America of half a century ago — as if the dirtier we become, the more sanctimonious we end up. Past presidents, such as John F. Kennedy and Bill Clinton, trumped even Trump in unleashing their reckless libidos on quite young White House staffers, an array of mistresses, and random women. But they were then young, liberal, loved by the media, and skilled incumbent politicians holding the power of the country at key moments in history.
Private buccaneer Trump so far has no such mitigating arguments to contextualize his reprehensible private banter. In the debate Trump played the Clinton defense of Moveon.org days: He was terribly sorry and now it was time to “move on” to solve problems — an argument that long ago had resonated with the Left.
In case that did not work, Trump used another Clinton liberal tactic: reminding us of others who do worse. Bill Clinton’s leaks about his sanctimonious opponents once led to the resignations of Republican congressmen whose private lives were said to be no better than Clinton’s. Never underestimate the comparative sleaze in Washington.
