The first debate between US presidential hopefuls Trump and Clinton threw into sharp relief the centrality of gender in this election
Since the United States Constitution doesn’t really allow us to hold national referendums, we Americans often find that presidential elections are less about who gets to govern next than about where we stand as a nation on a single issue. Monday night’s debate reminded us that this election has become just such a referendum, and the question before us is this: “Can a woman be president — yes or no?” Republicans seem to have been aware of this long before Democrats, and that’s why they nominated a candidate who is the monstrous embodiment of their own contempt for women.
Clinton won the debate the other night not because of she was the superior debater, not because she had a greater knowledge of the issues, not even because she has better policies than Trump. She won the debate because she was able to draw our attention back to the fundamental question about whether a woman can be president without even having to articulate it. That’s why the most important exchange in the debate was one that occurred early and that has been consistently misread by the media. It was the moment when she mocked his “trumped-up trickle-down” economic policies. When she said it she managed to press exactly the right button, and Trump wasted no time in unmasking himself as a thin-skinned, mansplaining, sexist bully.
On one level, Clinton knew that her comment would agitate Trump because it was even more stupidly catchy than his attempts to brand her as “Crooked Hillary”. For a candidate whose debate preparation consisted exclusively of practicing zingers with his buddies during Wrestlemania, Trump must certainly have been caught off-guard by the fact that Clinton beat him to the punch. But something much more important was unfolding than the race to see which candidate would be the first to register a soundbite. As usual Hillary was vastly more subtle than her critics and even her supporters realise.
This particular dig at Trump was remarkable neither for its pithiness nor for its insight into his non-sensical economic policies. What visibly infuriated Trump was not the content of the statement but its very form. It was as if Clinton knew that he would become palpably enraged by her awkwardly deliberate delivery of the line itself, by its mildness and hokeyness. It was the deadliest “mom joke” ever told — poorly delivered, mildly amusing, disproportionately more pleasurable for the teller than the audience, and absolutely lethal in its effects. It was a kind of comedic false flag, a trap to trick the Donald into revealing that he himself was the punchline by allowing his visceral disgust for women to surface so early in the debate. She knew that he wouldn’t be able to let it go, and he fell all over himself trying to prove her right. He slipped into a caricature of masculinity in crisis — constantly interrupting, talking over, and mocking any woman that would dare challenge his adequacy.
Readers accustomed to high political satire or even the insufferable Prime Minister’s Questions were probably unimpressed with Hillary’s banter. The joke was almost too easy, like it wrote itself or was assembled by a committee of humourless bureaucrats. Again, the surface inanity should not blind us to the importance of what followed, especially the moment when Trump addressed Hillary scornfully as “Secretary Clinton” (emphasis on “secretary,” a sullen, sexist reminder of a woman’s proper place in the business world) before stopping to ask sarcastically for her consent — “Is that OK? Good. I want you to be very happy. It’s very important to me”.
What are we to make of this strange and aggressive interruption of his train of thought? Often when Trump interrupts himself in mid-sentence, he makes an absurd claim to a consensus; it’s not just Trump who thinks these things — as he constantly reminds us, “a lot of people are saying it, not just me”. The overture at creating consensus seems even more patronising and aggressive in the context of the debate. He is asking both Hillary and the electorate to acknowledge the misogynistic fantasy that has structured his entire campaign, not just that he can attack and demean a woman during a nationally-televised debate but that he can do so under the cover of magnanimity. It is as if he is admitting through this weirdly hostile gesture that a woman’s happiness is important for the Donald only to the extent that he can be perceived as bestowing it upon her — hence his desire to invest so much time and money in the atrociously sexist Miss USA and Miss Universe beauty pageants.
With a single, haltingly delivered line, Hillary managed to irritate Trump so greatly that he began lashing out at her in an odious and contemptible way. Since no moderator would ever dare to ask Trump such a question directly (if only because of the dread certainty that he would respond by saying that he’d love to see Ivanka in the White House), Hillary had to figure out a way to reorient the debate around the question of whether or not a woman can be president. In doing so, she made everyone watching perfectly aware of what the stakes of this election are.
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