US presidential politics, sliding into disrepute

Clinton and Trump

American politics has always had one foot in the gutter. Slave concubines. Model girlfriends on yachts. Monica Lewinsky. But no modern-era presidential contest has been so consistently debasing as this year’s train wreck featuring Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, experts say.

The race is like no other in living memory. Insults and rhetoric have reached new lows. Racism, misogyny, xenophobia, campaign trail violence, conspiracy theories, and authoritarianism have all made multiple appearances.

Genitalia size was discussed in the Republican primary debates. The party’s nominee even suggested he could shoot someone in the street and not lose votes. Indecency has become a campaign hallmark.

The shameful slogan of the 2016 race: “Grab them by the pussy.”

How did America get here?

That stomach-churning brag, caught on a hot mic in 2005 in a video that landed like an atomic bomb Friday, was uttered by Trump, the filterless billionaire Republican nominee whose off-color attacks are too numerous to list.

He is not alone in the sad spectacle. Democrat Clinton is the nominee Americans love to loathe, a tarnished if experienced politician whose scandals — emails, Benghazi, charges of “enabling” her husband’s infidelities — have been fodder for years.

The rivals, together the most unpopular nominees in modern times, have led US politics to rock bottom.

“We’ve never seen anything like this,” American University professor and historian Allan Lichtman told AFP, citing the video that captured Trump bragging about groping women’s crotches with impunity.

In the past two elections, an African American ran for president — creating clear potential for nastiness in racially-tense America — but “it didn’t descend into the gutter,” Lichtman said.

This year he points the finger squarely at Trump. “He is a history-shattering negative candidate.”

Thomas Jefferson set the early standard of indecency, with the dispute over whether he fathered children with one of his slaves dragged into the 1804 election.

Salacious scandals involving presidents Grover Cleveland, Warren Harding, John F. Kennedy and others followed.

Then in 1987, Democratic candidate Gary Hart was photographed with a 29-year-old model on the boat “Monkey Business.”

Hart dropped out of the race days later, and presidential campaigning finally went tabloid — opening an era that was to culminate a decade later with the Lewinsky sex scandal that led to Bill Clinton’s impeachment.

But 2016, observers argue, is vindictiveness and prurience on steroids.

– ‘Tawdriness of it all’ –

Minutes before the second presidential debate Sunday, Trump held a surprise event with three women who have accused Bill Clinton of sexual misconduct, including rape — charges the former president has denied.

The women all attended the debate, staring on at the wife of the man they say assaulted them. Many blasted it as a hateful stunt.

When House Speaker Paul Ryan, the nation’s top elected Republican, distanced himself from Trump Monday, it was treated as another awkward twist in an already-unprecedented race.

“We have become inured to all this,” wrote columnist Richard Cohen in the Washington Post. “The lying, the slippery definitions of sex… the tawdriness of it all, the erasure of the line between private and public.”

Ferrel Guillory, director of the Program on Public Life at University of North Carolina, said political discourse is being enflamed online.

Charges and countercharges are emerging in real time. What a generation ago may have been a crude political conversation shared over beers is now being read or watched by hundreds, thousands, even millions of people.

According to Guillory, unwritten rules that used to keep the blood sport of politics somewhat civilized are now being openly flouted, such as during the latest debate, when Trump threatened to imprison Clinton if he is elected.

“That’s not what we do in America. We don’t jail our political opponents,” Guillory said.

“In the NFL there’s a rule against spearing someone in the head. Well, we’ve had some political spearing in the head, particularly from Trump.”

An unsparing new Trump campaign ad shows Clinton when she had pneumonia last month, coughing at the dais and stumbling as she tried to get into her motorcade — giving voice to fringe conspiracy theories that she has a serious undisclosed illness.

One of Trump’s sons has appeared on a radio show linked to a white supremacist. A pastor who backs Trump tweeted a picture of Clinton in blackface.

Trump himself, frustrated about a protester at one of his events in February, yelled: “I’d like to punch him in the face.”

The candidate has talked about a Fox debate moderator’s menstrual cycle. He embarked on a feud with a former Miss Universe, ranting about her overnight to his 12 million Twitter followers.

In his 1964 essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” Richard Hofstadter argued that the animosities and tensions circulating in public could produce a “sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy.”

That volatile mix is playing itself out today, Guillory argued.

Whether 2016’s nastiness will open the floodgates in future elections is debatable.

“If Trump loses big, it probably won’t become commonplace,” Lichtman said.

“If he wins, or comes close, he will have set a new model for American politics.”