By Leon Hadar.
It remains to be seen whether the Donald has succeeded in putting his crude remarks about women behind him, and whether he could regain political momentum
There was very little doubt that Sunday’s showdown was the nastiest television debate in history, with the tension between Mrs Clinton and Mr Trump on full display from the opening moment.
IN the midst of the Watergate scandal in 1974, when then Republican president Richard Nixon was facing the threat of impeachment, the respected senator Barry Goldwater came to visit the embattled White House occupant.
The Arizona senator made it clear to Nixon that he had lost the support of almost all the Republicans on Capitol Hill and urged him to resign. Immediately!
Nixon listened to the advice of the GOP elder. He recognised that his fate was sealed, and left office before Congress was to take action to force him out.
But Donald J Trump made it clear to the dozens of Republican leaders – who over the weekend had urged him to withdraw from the presidential race, after the release on Friday of a video showing him speaking of women in vulgar sexual terms – that he was no Richard Nixon.
He would “never drop out of this race in a million years”, Mr Trump told reporters on Saturday. “That’s not the kind of person I am,” he added. “I am in this until the end.” He was certainly planning to attend the televised presidential debate on Sunday.
Unlike in the case of Nixon and Goldwater, none of the Republican stars has actually approached the Donald and pleaded with him to drop out from the race.
Instead, the GOP leaders – including a respected figure like Arizona senator and former presidential nominee John McCain – have released statements in which they explained that their candidate’s comments from 11 years ago that were caught on a tape, including bragging about sexually assaulting women, made it impossible for them to vote for him in November.
The consensus in Washington on the eve of the debate was that it was finally over the Donald. This time for real. Bashed by the Mainstream Media, mocked by the pundits, and now abandoned by his former Republican allies, there was even some speculation that Mr Trump would be forced by his party leaders to withdraw from the race after the debate. Perhaps the vice-presidential nominee, Governor Mike Pence from Indiana, would head the ticket?
It was a great moment of high political drama which helped transform the second televised debate in St Louis between Mr Trump and his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, into one of the greatest political reality shows of all times. A power play between two global celebrities and a mishmash of politics and sex, millions of viewers at home and around the world were watching it and waiting to see whether the Donald would finally implode right before their eyes or whether he would once again emerge as the ultimate survivor.
The level of suspense was high: Will the event, a 90-minute lone televised town-hall meeting hosted by CNN, turn out to be an ugly shouting match between the two presidential candidates dominated by the allegations of sexual degradation of women by Mr Trump and of the sexual misconduct of Mrs Clinton’s husband?
Will Mr Trump be able to effectively manage the crisis, convince viewers that his comments on the video were nothing more than moronic locker room swagger, and succeed in maintaining the support of Republican voters?
Or will the debate prove to be another stage in the electoral downfall of the Republican nominee who was already continuing to lose support among independent voters, women, and educated professionals before the damaging tape was released on Friday? The expectation was that in the aftermath of the debate, pundits would not be speculating whether Mr Trump was going to win the race, but by how much he was going to lose it.
It would take a few days before pollsters would be able to figure out who had “won” the debate and whether the performances of the two candidates had a major effect on their chances of winning the election. But it did become clear at the end of the televised encounter that while Mr Trump may have failed to hit a home run, he was able to demonstrate his skills as an escape artist. He forced his opponent – who had won the first debate – to play defence and may have persuaded Republican sceptics that he was here to stay.
There was very little doubt that Sunday’s showdown was the nastiest television debate in history, with the tension between the two candidates on full display from the opening moment when they took the stage and didn’t shake each other’s hands. Mr Trump at one point said that his rival had “hate in her heart” when she said that half of his supporters were in the “basket of deplorables” and referred to her as “the devil”, while Mrs Clinton accused her adversary of peddling the “racist lie” that President Barack Obama was not born in the United States.
The worst-case scenario from the Republican presidential nominee’s perspective would have been for the debate to end up being dominated by the vulgar language he used about women more than a decade ago.
In that case, the public and media outcry ignited by the release of a decade-old video tape would have exploded on the television screen in full view of the entire world – and would have made it close to impossible for the Donald to recover.
But after close to 20 minutes into the debate, it seemed that Mr Trump was able to contain the fallout of the release of the video, dismissing it as just “locker room talk” and stressing that “certainly I’m not proud of it”, before turning the focus on accusations about Bill Clinton’s sexual misconduct. He noted that some of the women who accused the former president of sexual abuse were in the audience, and tried to re-direct the conversation to his plans to “Make America Great Again”.
Mrs Clinton did her best to refocus attention on the video. “Yes, this is who Donald Trump is,” she said. “This is who Donald Trump is but the question our country must answer is this is not who we are.” She said that she had differed before with Republicans over policy. But “I never questioned their fitness to serve”, she said. “Donald Trump is different.”
Those were powerful words, but they also marked the end of the discussion about the video, with Mr Trump going on offence, blasting Mrs Clinton for her use of a private email server to handle government business, and vowing that as president he would ask the Justice Department to re-investigate her conduct.
The Republican presidential nominee also forced Mrs Clinton to defend her policies as secretary of state and her achievements as a senator representing New York, as well as the economic record of the Obama administration. According to his narrative, Hillary represented the political and economic status-quo which he pledged to overturn.
But Mrs Clinton’s main argument that her rival was unfit to become the next president continues to resonate among voters. It also remains to be seen whether Mr Trump has succeeded in putting his crude remarks about women behind him, especially if, as some expect, more videos in which the Donald made offensive comments about women and minorities will be released in the coming days.
Contrary to earlier expectations, the outcome of the debate didn’t force Mr Trump out of the race. He survived. But it’s doubtful that he would be able to regain political momentum and succeed in expanding his electoral support beyond his core base of mostly white blue-collar workers. His performance in the debate may have done nothing to change that reality.
