WASHINGTON: The second US presidential debate was bitter, low, and dark, going where no presidential candidates have ever gone before.
After accusing Hillary Clinton's husband of raping a woman, Donald Trump threatened to put his opponent in jail for executive misconduct if he won. She charged him with serial abuse of women as revealed in his interviews, actions that even the moderator said was tantamount to sexual assault, but which Trump dismissed as ''locker room talk.'' Grace and refinement were at a premium. At the end of 90 minutes of ferocious wrangling, there were no winners but one certain loser - America.
The Republican candidate had given enough indication that it would get ugly if he was cornered with the content of interviews more than a decade ago in which he made crass remarks about women.
Some 90 minutes before the debate, he had presented three women who have accused Bill Clinton of sexual assault before the media, as if to pre-empt questions about his own conduct. Considering that his lewd remarks on tape was the top topic of conversation across America, the moderators had no choice but to ask him.
''Mine are words, and his (Bill Clinton's) was action. His was what he's done to women. There's never been anybody in the history politics in this nation that's been so abusive to women,'' Trump shot back furiously. He then attacked Hillary Clinton for being an enabler of sexual misconduct, claiming she had laughed at a young woman who was raped after getting her rapist off the hook as a lawyer.
"When Hillary brings up a point like that and she talks about words that I said 11 years ago, I think it's disgraceful, and I think she should be ashamed of herself," he said. He later compared her to the devil and said she has "hate in her heart" because she had called his followers "deplorable".
Hillary Clinton took the high road, in the process allowing charges against her husband, the former President, to hang in the air by neither denying nor contesting them. She quoted Michelle Obama saying ''when they go low, you go high,'' but essentially left accusations against her husband unaddressed, a cop-out that Trump fans took as vindication of the charges.
Much later, she invited social media ridicule by invoking Abraham Lincoln to defend saying different things to different audiences, allowing Trump, whose dissembling is now stuff of lore, to taunt her by saying, ''You are no Abraham Lincoln''.
On the occasions when they discussed policy, they stuck to familiar positions. Questioned about his remarks about Muslims, Trump spoke of threats to America and advised them to report any suspicious activity to show they are loyal to the US. A tweet followed shortly after: I am a Muslim, and I would like to report a crazy man threatening a woman on state in Missouri #debate.''
It was all very surreal, and many Americans spoke of having put their children to bed before switching on the TV, such was the malice and rancor in arguably the most spiteful debate in the history of politics, much of it, according to the liberal media, coming from Trump.
"In Second Debate, Donald Trump Showcases His Dark Soul,'' was the headline in Mother Jones, with a strap that read, ''He really is that asshole who boasted of grabbing women 'by the pussy'." On Twitter, a Clinton aide asked Trump to ''Go f—k yourself,'' before the campaign disowned the remark and he apologised for the outburst.
The consensus in the commentariat was that nothing had changed much in terms of support, with both bases intact. Trump was deemed to have done better because expectations from him are so low. Some Democrats complained that Hillary had failed to put him away by being too passive, while Trump fans rejoiced in the aggression of their idol.
Polls in the liberal spectrum (CNN, YouGov.com etc) showed Clinton having won the debate handily. Polls in the conservative media (Breitbart News, Drudge Report etc) showed Trump winning handsomely.
The divide extended to the tabloids: The pro-Trump New York Post banner read: Jail to the Chief. The pro-Hillary New York Daily News, which bannered with ''Grab 'em by the P---y,'' some days back, came up with ''Grab A Seat, Loser.''
The real loser of the evening was the United States of America.
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