In case you didn’t see the second debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, the GOP nominee threatened to jail her if he wins, said she “has tremendous hatred in her heart,” made noise about our having 1,000 years of coal reserves that can burned cleanly, displayed his thoroughgoing ignorance about Syria, lied for the umpteenth time about his stance on the Iraq invasion, lied about U.S. taxes being the highest in the world, admitted he was proud about not paying taxes for years, made bogus claims about Iran and the Iran nuclear deal, mumbled a few sentences claiming that his boasting of grabbing women’s genitals was “just words,” and—by pacing behind Clinton and walking up close her while she was answering questions—couldn’t have done a better job of coming across as a sexual predator had he worn clown makeup.
Let me repeat, the GOP nominee threatened to jail his election opponent if he wins the presidency. This is banana republic talk. Or Putin talk.
Clinton, as usual, exhibited calm, remained on topic, connected warmly with individual questioners in the audience, and gave real and as comprehensive of answers as two minutes allowed (although she took a serious misstep with her claim that the U.S. is now “energy independent”). Not when we’re still importing 9 million barrels of oil a day.
As we have come to expect, there were no questions about climate change. Also none about racial justice even in St. Louis, the largest city near where Black Lives Matter emerged because of a lack of such justice.
So, what did the pundits have to say?
Before the debate began, Van Jones had something to say:
E.J. Dionne at The Washington Post writes—A vicious presidential debate
The most substantively shocking moment in the debate came early on. Speaking of Trump’s instability and untrustworthiness, Clinton said: “It’s just awfully good that someone with the temperament of Donald Trump is not in charge of the law in our country,” Clinton said.
Trump immediately shot back: “Because you’d be in jail.”
Nothing could have done more to reinforce fears of Trump as a dangerously authoritarian figure.
Friday’s video almost certainly ended any chance Trump has of becoming president. Clinton understood this and acted accordingly, believing that Trump would do her work for her. He largely did. Trump’s desire to fight back ferociously kept him in the race but left him badly wounded and made some of the wounds deeper. He was thus more dangerous to his party after the debate than he was before it began.
Richard Wolffe at The Guardian writes—The nicest thing you could say about Trump’s performance was that it was bonkers:
That banging sound you heard were the last nails being hammered into the coffin of the Trump campaign. Or it might have been the thumping of Donald Trump as he stalked the debate stage. [...]
He prowled around Hillary Clinton, looming behind her when she approached the undecided voters in the audience. He hugged himself and hooked his hands in his belt. He inhaled so sharply through his nose that he sounded like he was snorting his own insults.
Wounded animals behave in strange ways, and Donald Trump was nothing if not strange at the second presidential debate. He went far beyond barking his usual interruptions and conspiracies from the darkest corners of the internet: he answered a question from a Muslim voter by saying it was “a shame” there was Islamophobia. Then, two feet away from his questioner, he stoked Islamophobia as much as he possibly could: “We could be very politically correct, but whether we like it or not, there is a problem.”
Roxane Gay at The New York Times writes—What Donald Trump Taught Us Tonight:
Hillary Clinton is dealing with a unique challenge — having to stay sharp with an incompetent opponent. She managed to remain on message throughout the debate. She offered several specifics while always clearly demarcating the difference between her and Mr. Trump. She demonstrated grace under pressure. And in the end, when asked to say something positive about her opponent, she reminded us of just how much she outclasses Mr. Trump as a political candidate. She complimented his children despite how easy and satisfying it would have been to say the truth — that no, there is nothing commendable about Donald Trump.
Jonathan Capehart at The Washington Post writes—Three revealing Donald Trump moments in that hot mess of a town hall:
From what I can see on the Twitters and from my GOP sources, Trump appears to have held off the revolt that seemed sure to come on Monday. But the damage is done. What Trump has done in the 13 days since the first debate, especially since the release of his lecherous and offensive “Tic Tac” banter from 2005 that suggested a penchant for sexual assault, should be all the proof anyone needs that he should not be president of the United States. He has destroyed the GOP. God forbid he be given the chance to destroy the USA.
Alexandra Petri at The Washington Post writes—Why Donald Trump and Billy Bush’s leaked conversation is so awful:
It must be nice to have a magical room where you can go, drop your pants and pretend for a few glorious hours that women are not people.
A repellent, but remarkably unexamined, idea that we carry around in society with us is the notion that somehow this is okay. That this is just boys being boys. That we must give boys a safe, unpolluted, secret space where they can stop the exhausting charade of acting as though women contain the same internal worlds that they do themselves.
This is what it gets back to: the idea that men are people, and women are just women.
Of course what Donald Trump said is awful. But, as Kelly Oxford noted on Twitter, it’s the fact that Billy Bush just nodded along that gives us rape culture.
Marcy Wheeler at emptywheel writes—Trump is Who He's Always Been, and Trump is the Epitome of the GOP; They Have to Own Him:
The Washington Post’s David Fahrenthold has come up with another scoop. While scraping for video clips does not seem to be Fahrenthold’s strength, like the KFile boys who bolted Buzzfeed in the middle of the night for the apparently greener pastures of CNN, this clip posted by The Washington Post is bigger than anything that has come before. It doesn’t matter if it is by weight, timing, or the clear combination of the two, it is simply huge. Game changing.
The most striking thing, however, is not that this video exists, nor that it has emerged to public view, it is that the Republican party worthies and press seem to think it is shocking. Seriously, this information, and the Donald Trump it reflects, is exactly who Donald Trump is, and has been, for decades.
Donald Trump is a once and forever informationally ignorant, self serving jackass extreme narcissist. But he has been that for decades to anybody paying attention. Trump was the leader from the start in the Republican primary, and was the easy winner of their nomination. Why? Because the votes on the ground count, much to the consternation of supposed “sane party elders”, and the votes on the ground made Trump an easy winner. He is exactly what the current Republican GOP party embodies at its heart.
Jessica Valenti at The Guardian writes—I thought this election would be less sexist. Trump proved me wrong:
Nearly three years ago, I predicted that the sexism surrounding the 2016 presidential election would be “more sly than straightforward”. I thought Republicans would never want to repeat the mistakes of 2008 – the “iron my shirt” moments and comments about Hillary Clinton’s cackle.
“If Clinton runs again,” I wrote, “it’s doubtful that we’ll see the same level of sexist vitriol.” Well, the joke is on me!
In this election, we’ve seen the Republican presidential nominee brag about the size of his penis on a debate stage, defend calling a woman “Miss Piggy”, suggest women who have abortions be “punished” and claim that a female moderator must have been on her period. [...]
I was naive to think this could go any other way. That Americans could elect the first female president without T-shirts calling her a bitch, jokes about sex tapes and insults about women’s bodies. That we could make this happen without embarrassing ourselves. Instead, we chose to confront the possibility of a historic moment for women with a candidate whose misogyny is so mythic he could have sprung fully-formed from Freud’s skull. Trump is more symbol than person at this point, representing just how juvenile and ridiculous America is when it comes to the way we think about women and leadership.
Christian Christensen at Common Dreams writes—Trump’s Misogyny and the Media’s “Righteous-Indignation Dollar”:
Once again, Trump has exposed himself to be the misogynist many of us suspected. And, again – as with his racism and Islamophobia – the US media has been quick to pitch itself as outraged over his new grotesque comments from 2005.
I do not doubt the sincerity of the attacks on Trump from individual journalists. Nor is this an argument that the responsibility for Trump’s words can be found anywhere other than with Trump himself. But Trump’s disgusting comments are also a reminder that massive double-standards in how men and women are treated in and by the media are important context for the story.
Trump’s words did not emerge in a social vacuum, and, as an industrial collective, the US media’s track record on the representation of women is nothing short of shameful. There is more than a drop of irony in newspapers printing articles attacking Trump, while on other pages of their publications near anorexic models advertise clothing and other fashion items, forwarding an ideal body-type that is not only impossible to attain, but physically harmful. There is similar irony in television pundits shaming Trump’s shaming and glorification of sexual abuse, while at the same time women “over a certain age” are quietly erased from our screens in favor of younger, more “attractive” talent. Add this to the fact that in popular film and television, women are sorely under-represented and under-heard, and the hypocrisy is only magnified.
Juan Cole at Informed Comment writes—How Far will Americans take anti-Muslim Hate? Making them wear Green Stars?
The de facto criminalization of being Muslim or speaking Arabic, which is contrary to every core American value and contradicts the First Amendment, is proceeding apace. The number of anti-Muslim attacks in the US is up by 80% since Donald Trump announced his proposed Muslim ban last fall. The article just linked to concerns a Muslim man who was sitting in a parked car in Washington DC when a passer-by threw a fire-bomb into it and said, “Take that, Muslim!” The victim is in hospital.
In early September, a 32-year-old Brooklyn woman punched, kicked and tried to rip the veils off two Muslim women pushing baby carriages. She shrieked, “This is the United States of America, you’re not supposed to be different from us … You don’t belong here!” [...]
In September, a Trump-inspired felon allegedly set fire to and destroyed a prominent mosque about an hour’s drive north of West Palm Beach. His slogan? All Muslims are radical. Not even professional Islamophobes would say that. There is a long history of white supremacists destroying Black churches. The mosques have joined that fate.
If you follow all these disturbing incidents around the country, it is extremely alarming and shows the United States going in a very disturbing direction. Muslims comprise about 1% of the US population, about 3 million people. 99.999% of them are law-abiding, kind and generous citizens.
Sarah Jones at The New Republic writes—The Religious Right’s Devotion to Donald Trump Will End the Movement As We Know It:
Among his hardcore fans, Trump will survive these scandals; his supporters are now making that clear to his detractors. But his pious boosters can’t count on the same.Trump’s principal appeal to voters is his devotion to capitalism, not God. The religious right, meanwhile, pins itself to a claim of moral superiority. It always had more to lose.
Some evangelicals, like the Southern Baptist Convention’s Russell Moore, understand this, and have publicly criticized Trump’s convenient conversion. But their voices were never enough to sway the rank-and-file. The religious right was never as unique as it wanted everyone to believe, and now Trump has revealed the movement’s superiority to be the ruse it’s always been.
The religious right isn’t dead yet. But after this election becomes history, the movement will be forced to reckon with the consequences of its quest for power. Young adults, who overwhelmingly oppose Trump, are already leaving conservative churches, and the religious right’s Trump moment will surely only fuel this trend.
Joan Walsh at The Nation writes—https://www.thenation.com/article/trump-stalks-clinton-creepily-but-hell-never-catch-her/
In the 90-minute clash, a must-win for Trump, the flailing nominee stalked Clinton creepily, looming behind her menacingly, and slightly hilariously, in shot after shot on live television. Again he sniffed incessantly, and he barked at the very capable moderators. “It’s three against one,” he bleated, when CNN’s Anderson Cooper and ABC’s Martha Raddatz reined him in on going over time limits. He claimed Clinton “has tremendous hate in her heart,” and threatened to put her in jail in the increasingly unlikely event he becomes president. And when asked if he agreed with his running mate Mike Pence about the need to intervene in Syria, he said no. “We haven’t spoken, and I disagree with him.”
But all of that seemed fairly normal compared to the debate’s opening antics. An hour before, as pundits wondered whether Trump would come into the session appropriately “contrite” about his sexual-assault braggadocio, the defiant, perhaps deranged GOP nominee invited the media into a room to meet women who have charged Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton and her husband with a variety of unsubstantiated misdeeds. There were old Clinton accusers like Paula Jones and Kathleen Willey, the Trump-supporting Juanita Broaddrick, who went public with claims Bill Clinton raped her 20 years after she alleges it happened, and a now-grown juvenile rape victim whose assailant was defended by a young law professor named Hillary Clinton—who was appointed by the judge in the case. It was the lowest moment in American politics of my lifetime—and it signaled how the debate would proceed.