(CNN)CNN commentators and guest analysts offer their take on Wednesday night’s final presidential debate. The opinions expressed in these commentaries are solely theirs.
Julian Zelizer: A stunning moment in the debate
Buck Sexton: We’re trapped in crass reality show
The final presidential debate was as expected: nasty, brutish and not short enough. Trump won, though it was likely too close a call to affect the polls. While the policy substance was probably the strongest of all three candidate face offs, it was overshadowed by the plentiful personal attacks. Nothing new was learned about either candidate. It was a debate that was more instructive as a microcosm of a generally dispiriting election race than as a moment to change the minds of undecided American voters.
Perhaps the melee on stage was inevitable. We have reached the saturation point for mudslinging in this election. A public contest for who should be the next commander-in-chief shouldn’t feel like the most crass, ungallant reality TV show imaginable, yet here we are. No matter what the final outcome on November 8th, both major parties’ top-of-ticket candidates have largely deprived this country of a substantive public debate on policies that matter.
Instead, we have been privy to an all-out partisan media war, with unrepentant Hillary Clinton enablers on one side, and Donald-Trump-at-all-costs defenders on the others (though a vast majority of the chattering class clings to Madam Secretary’s side). This battle of propaganda machines will churn on, unmercifully, until election day, and whichever candidate ends up winning the White House, he or she will have been ethically sullied and politically hobbled along the way. The debate was merely reflective of these unfortunate realities.
Buck Sexton is a political commentator for CNN and host of “The Buck Sexton Show” on TheBlaze. He was previously a CIA counterterrorism analyst.
Frida Ghitis: Donald Trump is a frightening man
There’s no point in going through the specific beats, themes and responses in this final presidential debate of 2016. The actual answers provided by the candidates to Chris Wallace’s admirably measured questions were so overshadowed by Trump’s blatant refusal to guarantee that he would abide by the simple rules of our democracy that they are irrelevant to the decision voters face in a few short weeks.
Any patchy veneer Trump might still have of his being a legitimate candidate running a legitimate campaign were erased when he announced that he would keep America “in suspense” over whether he would, in Wallace’s words, support a “peaceful transfer of power” if the election did not go his way.
Combine that statement with his frequent intimations of Second Amendment “solutions,” his tacit embrace of the extreme alt-right and his declaration from the very stage that his opponent was a “criminal” who should’ve been “prevented from running for office,” and the foul brew that Trump is fermenting has a familiar odor: It smells of beer halls in November.
There is no longer a subtle way to say this: Trump and what he represents must be soundly rejected, wholly repudiated and fully dispelled from our body politic, by a popular and electoral number that can’t be questioned. Any other outcome risks a rupture in the fabric of our republic.
Jeff Yang is a columnist for The Wall Street Journal and a frequent contributor to radio shows including Public Radio International’s “The Takeaway” and WNYC’s “The Brian Lehrer Show.” He is the co-author of “I Am Jackie Chan: My Life in Action” and editor of the graphic novel anthologies “Secret Identities” and “Shattered.”
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