Wake Me Up for the Apocalypse: The Third U.S. Presidential Debate (Oct. 20th, 2016)

"Well, I think her history is far from being over. I'd like to answer that question in another 15 years from now. I think she is going to go down at a minimum as a great senator. I think she is a great wife to a president. And I think Bill Clinton was a great president."

“The economy was doing great. Look at what happened during the Clinton years. I mean, we had no war, the economy was doing great, everybody was happy. A lot of people hated him because they were jealous as hell. You know people get jealous and they hate you."

-- Donald Trump, 2008 interview with NY1 reviewed by CNN's KFile

What a difference eight years makes.

Donald Trump entered his third debate with Hillary Clinton desperately needing what he failed to deliver in their first two verbal confrontations - a performance strong enough to either shake up a race that seems increasingly set, or, to limit the collateral damage on the Republican Party’s Senate and House races from what could well be the first genuine landslide defeat since Regan vs Mondale in 1984.

For the first thirty or so minutes everything seemed to be going to plan. Trump was poised, measured, focused, answering questions in a buttery baritone designed to convey his presidential mien through projecting coherence, calm, and proper temperament. It was not to last. He faced a very different Clinton than the mechanically pedantic, ‘play it safe’ version determined to sit on her lead from their previous encounter.

Buoyed by polls showing her hovering on the edge of a double digit lead (which could in turn translate into a 400-plus electoral blowout), acting like someone with victory in sight -- and wearing the same white “Sincerity” pantsuit in which she’d accepted the Democratic nomination -- Clinton delivered a strong performance, swatting Trump’s attacks away like she would an errant fly. She launched blistering attacks on his signature policy proposals — the proposed border wall with Mexico and deportations of illegal immigrants. Her language was brutal, deriding those as ideas that are “not in keeping with who we are as a nation” and ones, she said, that “would rip our country apart.”

After a relatively subdued and surprisingly substantive opening segment on potential Supreme Court appointments, Clinton began initiating the first part of her strategy by trying to provoke a more animated response from her volatile (and voluble) opponent. She pointed to Trump’s failure to discuss his wall and his promise that Mexico would pay for it when he met two months ago with the country’s president, Enrique Pena Nieto.

“He didn’t even raise it,” Clinton said. “He choked. And then he got into a Twitter war.”

Trump, probably remembering his pre-debate coaching prep, labelled his meeting with the Mexican president as “very nice” before pivoting to trade, attacking Clinton for her husband Bill’s signing of NAFTA with the United States’ North American neighbours.

Unlike the previous St. Louis shootout, the obvious hatred between the two candidates took a while to build. But as the debate ticked towards and past the midway point, Clinton, who’d been attempting to bait her opponent from the get-go, challenged Trump over the nine women who have accused him of sexual assault after he attempted to dismiss them as liars.

“Donald thinks belittling women makes him bigger,” Clinton observed. “He goes after their dignity, their self-worth, and I don't think there is a woman anywhere that doesn't know what that feels like. So we now know what Donald thinks and what he says and how he acts toward women. That's who Donald is. I think it's really up to all of us to demonstrate who we are and who our country is and to stand up and be very clear about what we expect from our next president.”

Clinton’s playbook, which essentially followed the same pattern as the first debate, called for her to keep chipping away at Trump’s cool, believing that sooner rather than later, he would show his default self. She piled it on, accusing Trump of acts such as using “undocumented immigrants to build Trump Tower.” Steadily under fire, her opponent’s calm demeanor slowly gave way to characteristic bombast, unwarranted bravado and unscripted outbursts that have come to encapsulate both of Trump’s first two debate performances and his entire, erratic campaign.

After Wallace asked Clinton about “open border” comments she made in a private speech revealed by the suspiciously timed WikiLeaks this month, she levelled Cold War style accusations at Russia (one almost thought she was tempted to say, the ‘USSR’) for attempting to influence the election and challenged Trump to join her in condemning the Russians for their KGB-style intervention.

Trump asserted that Putin would respect him more than he currently does President Obama or a possible President Clinton.

“That’s because he’d rather have a puppet as president,” Clinton answered.

“You’re the puppet,” Trump shot back. “You’re the puppet.”

Two kids fighting in the sandbox. “You did it.”

“I didn’t. You did.”

Hardly Jefferson versus Hamilton. But this was never a conflict of that calibre. It was the verbal equivalent of a knife fight, or, more accurately, a bull fight with Clinton constantly waving the red cape.

Even as his cool began to dissolve and he began to interrupt and interject more frequently, Trump managed to land the occasionally effective jibe, such as attacking Clinton as a long-time Washington player who’s failed to deliver results.

“You do have experience,” Trump said after Clinton attacked his apparent hypocrisy for railing against trade deals despite having his own products made in Mexico and using foreign steel to build his hotels. “I say the one thing you have over me is experience. But it is bad experience because what you've done has turned out badly. For 30 years you've been in a position to help. If you say that I used steel or I used something else, make it impossible for me to do. That I wouldn't mind. The problem is, you talk but you don't get anything done, Hillary. You don't.”

This prompted Clinton to follow up with a long winded attempt to compare and contrast both their careers and experience as she shifted into the second part of her strategy in order to build herself up and offer a vision and a reason for people to vote for her.

“You know, back in the 1970s, I worked for the Children's Defense Fund and I was taking on discrimination against African-American kids in schools,” Clinton said. “He was getting sued by the Justice Department for racial discrimination in his apartment buildings. In the 1980s, I was working to reform the schools in Arkansas. He was borrowing $14 million from his father to start his businesses. In the 1990s, I went to Beijing and I said women's rights are human rights. He insulted a former Miss Universe, Alicia Machado, and called her an eating machine. And on the day when I was in the situation room monitoring the raid that brought Osama bin laden to justice, he was hosting ‘The Celebrity Apprentice.’ I'll let the American people make that decision.”

Much of the commentary about this debate will centre around Trump’s blatant refusal to commit to accepting the election results. It was, by most bipartisan reactions, an extraordinary moment, one that caught even veteran newsman and moderator Chris Wallace by surprise. Wallace managed to avoid stammering as he chided Trump that, “there is a tradition in this country, in fact, one of the prides of this country is the peaceful transition of power and no matter how hard fought a campaign is that at the end of the campaign, that the loser concedes to the winner. Not saying you're necessarily going to be the loser or the winner, but that the loser concedes to the winner and the country comes together in part for the good of the country. Are you saying you're not prepared now to commit to that principle?”

Trump’s reply that, ““I will look at it at the time,” was provocative and unprecedented in its implications. No losing presidential nominee of either major party had ever refused to concede defeat after a democratically certified election. Despite the protracted legal battle which ensued in 2000, even Al Gore eventually conceded – and he had actually won the popular vote, an achievement which seems very unlikely for Trump this time around. But the billionaire wasn’t done. When Wallace pressed for further clarification, whether by intent or oversight, Trump poured proverbial fuel on the fire with the comment, “I will keep you in suspense,” which in turn provoked audible gasps from the debate audience.

This was the moment Clinton had been building up to and she pounced, denouncing Trump’s comments as “horrifying.” Showing more emotion then she had in any previous debate, her next statements had all of the conviction of a prosecutor summarizing a case to a jury prior to it retiring to consider both verdict and judgement: “This is a mind-set. This is how Donald thinks, and it's funny, but it's also really troubling. That is not the way our democracy works. We've been around for 240 years. We've had free and fair elections. We've accepted the outcomes when we may not have liked them, and that is what must be expected of anyone standing on a debate stage during a general election…”

As in Zola’s ‘J’Accuse,’ she turned to Trump and fired all her rhetorical barrels. “It just shows you're not up to doing the job. And let's be clear about what he's saying and what that means. He's denigrating, he is talking down our democracy. And I, for one, am appalled that somebody who is the nominee of one of our two major parties would take that kind of position.”

If Hillary Clinton cannot win by the power of her personality or the inspirational vision of her ideas, she is determined to do so by tearing down the credibility of her opponent’s. Donald Trump limped into the third and final presidential debate needing nothing less than the political demolition of Clinton, as well as offering proof that he could temperamentally handle the presidency. Instead, he allowed her to pummel him with his ego.

In the end, he was reduced to sniping, with increasingly plaintive interruptions of “Wrong!” at every one of her attacks.

“What a nasty woman,” was Trump’s comment about Clinton.

What a difference eight years makes.

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