Opinion

I know that it’s way, way, way too late to try to do any serious deconstruction of a Donald Trump performance, but, like Trump on a debate stage, I can’t help myself. Somehow, even though I know better, I hold to the notion that a presidential election, even this one, must be a serious affair.

"I promise you that we will be united against any Supreme Court nominee that Hillary Clinton, if she were president, would put up,” Senator John McCain said on a radio interview in Pennsylvania on Monday. “I promise you. This is where we need the majority.”

In a bitterly divided and polarized political environment, what are we to do to bring the country together on Nov. 8 and onward? How is anyone going to be able to lead us in this era of wrenching cultural, political and economic fissures?

"Such a nasty woman."

If you plan to tune in tonight to watch the final presidential debate, you probably won’t hear anything about some of our country’s most pressing concerns, like climate change, poverty and campaign finance. Again.

During the 2016 presidential campaign, no substantive area has highlighted the differences between the two main candidates as much as immigration. As the Council on Foreign Relations puts, it “[f]ew issues provide more grist for debate in Washington and on the campaign trail.” As a result, immigration is certain to resurface as a prominent partisan fault line over the coming weeks leading to election day.

While Donald Trump blathers on about a rigged election — a theory downplayed by a wide range of experts and his own running mate — and urges vigilance against hordes of undocumented people casting imaginary ballots, one real problem with this year’s electoral process is the opposite of the dire scenarios the GOP nominee is conjuring up.

In a recent issue of The Economist, President Barack Obama set out four major economic issues that his successor must tackle. As he put it:

Pity the male white supremacist: he began the year hopeful that a man who made no attempts to hide his racist rhetoric would ride white resentment all the way to the highest office in the land. But now, with three weeks until the general election, the great white behemoth is sinking under the rain of harpoons launched by angry women, and no matter how they try to spin the numbers, Donald Trump cannot win the election with the sole support of white men.

The United States narrowly averted two constitutional crises in elections in which a third party won states and electoral votes. In 1948, South Carolina Governor J. Strom Thurmond won four Southern states and 39 electoral votes as the States Rights (Dixiecrats) nominee, the second best third party performance until then, only trailing Theodore Roosevelt’s Progressive (Bull Moose) Party in 1912. Then, in 1968, Alabama Governor George C. Wallace won five states and 46 electoral votes as the American Independent party nominee, surpassing Thurmond’s electoral performance twenty years earlier, making his third party candidacy the second best performance in the entire scope of American history.

Which new installments — daily, hourly — of the enthralling Self-Demolition Tour of Donald Trump will emerge before the day is done?

In 1920, Rudyard Kipling (Nobel Prize in Literature 1907), published The Conundrum of the Workshops. This poem about review culture features the Devil as “first, most dread” critic who responds to human creative outputs with: “it’s pretty, but is it art?”, a review that hurls the makers into confusion, rivalry and anguish. What could be worse, for an artist, than to discover that what you were making is not art after all?

This year’s US presidential election is anything but ordinary – and anything but hopeful. You could call it a two-horse race in which both horses are behind.