An Epic Moment of National Shame: The Debate Was an Embarrassment for the Ages

Source: Politico | September 30, 2020 | John F. Harris

Trump shredded the rulebook and any sense of decorum.

At frequent intervals on Tuesday night, the natural human reaction—lower the sound, wince and look away—took over, and the first presidential debate of the 2020 general election became nearly unwatchable.

Those who did persist in watching were rewarded, in a perverse way: They witnessed history in the making. The proceeding was an epic spectacle, a new low in presidential politics, a new high watermark in national shame.

The stain will be visible for many years to come. It will serve as a reminder of the night the dam broke, and currents of contempt that have been building in public life for many years flooded the stage with tens of millions of Americans viewing President Donald Trump, Democratic nominee Joe Biden, and an overwhelmed moderator on live television.

General election debates—which have been a recurring feature of elections since 1960 and an institutional fixture since 1976—had been until Tuesday one of the few dimensions of the nation’s public life to preserve a certain aura of solemnity. That changed in the opening moments of the Cleveland debate.

The 90-plus minutes that followed were an almost perfect distillation of the politics of insult, indignation, interruption, and irrelevancy that are commonplace on talk radio, on cable news, on Twitter.

There is no mystery why this happened. Trump plainly arrived to shred the official debate rules, and shed any pretense of decorum. At numerous points, his honking interruptions blared without interruption. So did his putdowns, including mocking Biden’s performance in college 56 years ago—“You graduated either the lowest or almost the lowest in your class,” before adding, “There’s nothing smart about you, Joe.” He also brought up Hunter Biden’s drug problems and inaccurately said he received a dishonorable discharge from the Navy.

Trump’s barrage left Biden with a choice. He could draw a contrast by deferring to the rules and trying to appear patient and polite. He did that some of the time. Or he could try to embrace the spirit of the evening in what often sounded like a saloon argument, at the moment when the bartender is trying decide whether things are about to turn physical and he should call the cops.

“Will you shut up, man?” Biden challenged Trump, before lamenting, “This is so unpresidential.” Biden’s most vivid noun of the evening was clown. “Folks, do you have any idea what this clown’s doing?” he asked the audience. Later, as moderator Chris Wallace of Fox News tried with scant success to curb Trump’s speaking, Biden said, “It’s hard to get a word in with this clown.”

As the debate ended, Wallace observed with a rueful half-smile, “It’s been an interesting hour and a half.”

No need to be priggish about things. In some ways it can be entertaining to see politicians drop all pretense and start hurling their own waste at each other like primates at the zoo. But the intensity and unrelenting nature of the rudeness quickly ceased to be interesting and became simply depressing. In part this is because amid the barrage there were only a few passages of sustained coherence, in which a genuine and consequential disagreement between the candidates was actually illuminated.

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