Jeb Lund of Rolling Stone published an excellent post-debate piece yesterday. Worth a look for the specific criticisms of both performances, but the best section was about how tRump got this far:
In the end, Clinton's few missteps didn't matter, because there was one overwhelming conclusion to be drawn from the night: Trump looked incompetent because he's no longer only standing next to other Republicans.
Aside from the repugnant racism, xenophobia and misogyny, the Trump phenomenon remained amusing for months because it felt like it was engineered in some fouler deity's ironic punishment laboratory. Donald Trump flagrantly made shit up every moment he wasn't bullying everyone around him; it's just that his victims were a bunch of wealthy bullies who'd spent their careers haphazardly making shit up and sliming their way upward like a phalanx of slugs conquering a staircase.
Trump cut through over a dozen Republican candidates like an industrial saw shredding a box of Kleenex, and it couldn't have happened to a more dismal gallery of frauds. After years of complaining about deficits while promoting tax cuts that reduced government revenues by trillions, after years of promoting dominionist Christianity while claiming religious discrimination, after years of claiming to be victims while blaming everything wrong in America on homosexuals and college professors and minorities and Islam, after years of saying whatever the fuck they felt like and repeating it until it sounded true, each one of these blow-dried mediocrities got fired from The Apprentice: Republican Party by someone with even more sociopathic contempt for facts, logical consistency and other human beings than they had.
Hell, it wasn't even difficult. Just coming up with mean nicknames was enough on a stage teeming with their brand of puffed-up prevaricating nincompoopery. Donald Trump wasn't a legendary force, and he wasn't a ruthless killer. He was the only guy with a fork in a room full of inflatable clown punching bags – shoving them and waiting for them to rock back and forth, their fixed idiotic grins leaning into the fatal puncture.
My bold. Too funny and so true.