Which of the US presidential candidates has provoked the biggest emotional response? With no polling companies at my disposal, I’d wager most people would plump for Trump.
They’re either supporters who think he’s their saviour, rich buddy and maverick uncle rolled into one baseball hat-clad package, or they’re drowning in waves of nausea and disgust triggered by his every appearance on the public stage.
In the energies devoted to digesting the vileness of Donald Trump, the quality of Hillary Clinton's paid communications has been easy to overlook. Outside the US, we only see election advertising if we go looking for it, so her campaign's efforts feel less relevant than her TV debate victories.
But that doesn’t mean her ads haven’t been highly professional, polished affairs, with the capacity to inflict damage. To borrow the word used – admiringly – by US commentators, they are “brutal”. They have both moved me and made me laugh.
One of the best ads to date, War Hero, is an object lesson in authentic emotion. It shows second World War veteran and former prisoner-of-war Joel Sollender responding to Trump's sarcastic remark that one-time Republican presidential nominee John McCain became a war hero "because he was captured". Trump likes "people who weren't captured".
Sollender (91), who describes his war as being “70 years ago, and yesterday”, tells his story with a grace and humanity that Trump wouldn’t recognise if he was trapped in a tanning booth with it.
Trump is “everything I would not want to be or emulate”, Sollender says, hoping the US electorate would not “adulate a man like that”. By the end of the 80 seconds, as tears swell in his eyes, it is hard not to feel upset by the tiresome boil’s intrusion on his well-earned old age. Why does he, and people like him, have to put up with this crap? Why does the insult that adds to his injury have to be this blustering bully?
Speaking of bullies, one Clinton ad splices clips of movie bullies like Biff Tannen from Back to the Future and Regina George from Mean Girls with footage of Trump saying very similar things, only with less charisma.
In another ad, pointedly called Role Models, wide-eyed children absorb the sight of Trump horribly mocking a reporter with a disability and asserting, in the wake of a notorious interview with Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly, that there was "blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever".
The ads cut to Clinton addressing a live event. She looks entirely presidential.
There are many more. The official Clinton campaign, excluding the money spent by super PAC (political action committee) supporters, has poured $157million (€144 million) into television advertising to date, compared to Trump’s $44 million.
Her ads attack her opponent, yes. But they don’t feel like negative ads, because the person being negative within them is Trump. Best of all, Clinton needs no charts or graphs to call Trump a liar – she can simply show him contradicting himself.
One break from the norm stars the greatest comedian to occupy the White House in living memory: Barack Obama. "My greatest strength? Probably that I'm always early," he begins mischievously. The joke is that Obama's habit winds everybody else up. The point is that in some states Democrats do better in early voting than they do overall, so get out and vote.
Casual hatred
In the final fortnight, the paid messages from both sides will seep out thicker and faster. Trump’s core base will remain argument-proof, just as core bases inevitably are. On social media, his fans will veer seamlessly from inspirational quote to torrent of casual hatred, back to inspirational quote and then on to a new outbreak of parroted bile. It is the banality of evil for the age of the “shitshow”.
Dismal economic prospects may create the conditions that allow some forgotten red-staters to vote for a man of so many unoriginal prejudices, but it doesn’t excuse them for it. And frankly, there’s only so much rational analysis that can be done on a political tornado who treats the irrationality of men as both a fire to be stoked and the fuel to stoke it.
The best outcome to this risible circus, as pretty much every newspaper apart from the National Enquirer has decreed, is for Clinton to win by a comfortable margin and for Trump to make an uncharacteristically humble retreat to one of his luxury compounds, breaking a self-imposed golf arrest only to spend more time with his lawyers.
Instead, Trump’s chosen persona in the likely event of political defeat seems set to be that of cartoon agitator, White House stalker and snarling star of his own television channel. And the news will continue to revolve around devastating reports on the latest mass shootings, followed by faux-surprised repetition of whatever outrageous thing “the Donald” said that hour, followed by sport.
