【Action Archives】

Calling what happened in St. Louis on Action ArchivesSunday night a "presidential debate" is like calling most Twitter users with eggs for avatars "reasonable conversationalists."

Try as you might, there is little possibility of having a real exchange of views with Twitter eggs, who invariably walk away thinking they've won. And there's no talking with Donald Trump, either -- a man who cannot apologize for a single thing he's ever said without hurling worse barbs.

The Republican candidate, if we can still call him that when GOP luminaries have spent the weekend repudiating him, spent the 90-minute town hall debate stalking the stage and lashing out like a wounded animal. A hyena, maybe, given how much the rising, hectoring tone of Trump's voice was starting to sound like howling.

Anyone who has ever seen a school bully strike back when someone calls him out got major flashbacks. For a man who doesn't believe in PTSD, Trump is certainly capable of triggering a great deal of it.

Given that she was able to speak reasonably, or indeed speak at all, in the face of Trump's repeated interruptions, his unprecedented and outrageous threats, and his creepy invasion of her physical space, Hillary Clinton deserves the Congressional Medal of Honor.

In a position where most of us would have wanted to punch Trump in the face, Clinton kept her cool. She offered a few canned lines, hesitated a few times, and could have batted a few more questions out of the park, but she was not knocked off her game.

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Like Tim Kaine facing Mike Pence in the vice presidential debate before her, Clinton knew what tonight was really about: allowing her opponent to lie enough times on national television to run weeks' worth of political ads in battleground states.

It's hard to know where to start on the sheer volume of Trump's mendacity. You've probably seen the fact-checking articles already. (If not, here's one.) His gaslighting denial that he ever tweeted the words "sex tape" was probably his mildest untruth of the night; that alone tells you how low we've sunk in 2016.

But he did tell one truth: Clinton is a fighter.

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Threats against us all

In reviewing his latest book last year (it used to be called "Crippled America" until he flip-flopped on the title), I described Trump's prose style as:

Rather like sitting next to a charismatic bullying drunk at a dinner party. "I have proven everybody wrong," Trump says, then thumps the table in all caps. "EVERYBODY!" You can practically hear the other guests muttering polite agreement and checking their watches.

Boy, was Trump thumping the table in all caps in St. Louis, too.

He called Clinton "the devil"; he threatened post-election revenge on his opponent by appointing a "special prosecutor" to look into her "lies"; he casually refuted his running mate and professed affection for Putin; he dodged multiple questions about a tape in which he quite clearly made comments condoning sexual assault by, at one point, changing the subject to terrorism.

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Kudos to moderators Anderson Cooper and Martha Raddatz for trying to rope Trump in repeatedly -- fact-checking him in real-time, calling him out when he didn't even come close to answering the question. Kudos, too, for getting him to admit, as an aside, that he has skipped out on two decades of paying personal income tax.

But even Cooper and Raddatz seemed stunned into silence at the sheer volume of nonsense Trump was hurling, especially at his blatant attempt to hobble the umpires by claiming he was being given less time to speak. (He wasn't.)

The American system of presidential debates assumes a certain level of decency. There have been raised voices and candidates talking over each other, but nothing like this.

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Many statements rose to the level of eminent threat to the entire American experiment. Probably the most dangerous: Trump couldn't say whether or not he would ban Muslims from entering the United States. And in the most egregious moment of the night, he literally threatened to jail his political opponent if he wins.

If you're thinking that makes him sound like a would-be dictator in a banana republic, you're not alone. Trump has long been taking pages from the fascist playbook; fascists, after all, were never very clear about their policies beyond repeating the word "strength."

The closer we get to election day, the more dangerous this candidate looks. He has, as Clinton rightly pointed out, precipitated a countrywide rise in hate crime and given the Islamic State (ISIS) their best recruiting tool. He has provided aid and comfort to the Kremlin in its increasingly blatant attempt to swing a U.S. election.

We can only hope that on Nov. 9, we can all shake him off like so many 3 a.m. tweets from Twitter eggs.