The Debate Was the Climax of an Insane Media Day
Sunday night’s second presidential debate was another dramatic event, with Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton throwing down over both policy differences and what is now the most famous segment Access Hollywood never aired: the recently released videotape of Trump making lewd remarks about women. Trump-scandal dominated Sunday. Shortly before the debate began, Billy Bush was suspended from the Today show, in the wake of his obsequious encouragement of Trump’s bully-boy remarks as they made trailer-trash-talk. And minutes before the debate began, Trump staged himself for a photo op, flanked by women who have asserted sexual assaults against them by Bill Clinton. As these women expressed their pain and their support for Trump, the candidate’s campaign chief, Steve Bannon, could be seen smirking behind the barrage of press photographers.
In this context, it was disappointing but completely predictable that debate moderators Anderson Cooper and Martha Raddatz devoted the beginning of the debate not to serious matters, but to the Great Access Hollywood Colloquy. The Sunday morning news shows on both network and cable news got to be all high-and-mighty when it came to talk about Trump’s banal obscenities, but on the Lord’s Day, those networks could not play those obscenities frequently enough. When the history of this election is written, let’s hope there’s a lot of contempt for the way the campaign has been covered by TV as well as for much of the content of the campaigning. I was actually relieved when Trump, a master at avoiding a direct answer to anything anyone asks him, managed to turn the Billy Bush Summit Meeting into a verbal attack on ISIS.
Both Clinton and Trump seemed perfectly at ease dealing with the format of this debate — town hall style, with questions coming from 40 selected undecided voters. (I think that’s also the exact number of people in America who remain undecided about who they’ll vote for.) Clinton went for the personal touch, frequently repeating the questioner’s name and moving closer to him or her. Trump prowled the stage like a nightclub comic who specializes in insult humor. He repeatedly heckled Clinton by tossing in little barbs and demurrals as she spoke. I’d say he was working the room like Don Rickles in the latter’s prime, but Rickles never whined, as Trump did, about how many times he was interrupted by the moderators (“When I go a second over, you stop me”—wahh! Wahhh!), who were doing their jobs in cutting off run-on answers or, in many instances, no direct answer to a direct question at all.
The TV cameras were busier this night than in the previous debate, cutting from medium shots that took in Clinton, Trump, and the questioners to split-screens of the two candidates in close-ups, to capture their reactions to each other. (Clinton used the Poker Face and the Smiley Face most often. Trump was more ambitious, deploying the Ferocious Frown, the Supercilious Smirk, and the Oooh I’m So Angry! Face.) When Trump loomed up behind Clinton during various answers, the cameras had to zoom in tight on Clinton’s face so that Trump didn’t upstage her to the viewing audience.
On Friday night’s Late Show, Stephen Colbert referred to the then upcoming St. Louis debate as “The Kablooey in St. Louie,” and he was proven right. While Clinton retained the staid language of political discourse, calling Trump “unfit” to be president, Trump used vituperative scorn: “She has tremendous hate in her heart.”
As an end to a weekend in which Trump’s celebrity-gossip-show videotape dominated TV news more heavily than the WikiLeaks release of transcripts of some of Clinton’s speeches to Wall Streeters — primarily because Trump’s controversy had visuals and very bad words — the debate itself was like a long, David Foster Wallace-length footnote, to a Not-So-Great American Novel that many of us can’t wait to finish and immediately discard.
