For many abroad there was deep admiration for America. For others there was admixed with the admiration a suspicion: that the transcendence was only veneer and that underneath was the real America, the Ugly America. Now both know: it was all Hollywood makeup and perfect teeth orthodontically corrected perfect. The America that 40% of Americans find so mesmerizingly "authentic," the embodiment of who they are, is orange pond scum, a taker, a grabber of pussy and money, a charlatan, a fraud, an ignorant, violent, serial sex offender and racist.
For the world, the damage is done, that Trump will be a Loser on November 8 doesn't re-cloak the emperor. This man is the Leader of 40% of America?! America is exposed and exposure is forever. We will never be viewed as the last best hope, as the shining beacon on the hill. The light that shines forth from America now is the garish, blinking neon of the honky-tonk, an area to be avoided not replicated.
LONDON — If the 2016 American presidential election has polarized opinion at home, it appears to have united much of Europe in collective dismay: How could Donald Trump have come so far, many wonder, and the level of discourse sunk so low?
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...Maureen Cole-Burns, who is the chief operating officer at the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, added that the candidates had been "dragging [politics] into the gutter."
She added that, "as a British person watching that, it lowers America in my estimation."
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For the world, the damage is done, that Trump will be a Loser on November 8 doesn't re-cloak the emperor. This man is the Leader of 40% of America?! America is exposed and exposure is forever. We will never be viewed as the last best hope, as the shining beacon on the hill. The light that shines forth from America now is the garish, blinking neon of the honky-tonk, an area to be avoided not replicated.
Analysis: U.S. Presidential Election Crosses Invisible Line for Europeans
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...Maureen Cole-Burns, who is the chief operating officer at the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, added that the candidates had been "dragging [politics] into the gutter."
She added that, "as a British person watching that, it lowers America in my estimation."
...
[Le Monde] pointed to the theatrical quality of America's interminably long campaigns. But the second debate, it said, was nevertheless a "reflection of how Trump has degraded the democratic game."
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President Barack Obama's election, and his eight years in office, impressed many people abroad who had lost hope in the American political system during the deeply unpopular years of George W. Bush.
"I've lived in America before for a number of years and I was pretty impressed when they elected Obama. I saw that as a step forward," said Maureen Cole-Burns outside the House of Commons.
Trump's rise to within striking distance of the White House, she said, was like "two steps back."
[I can only imagine what my Chinese interpreter Kitty, who turned to me face-to-face in a cab in Beijing when I asked her what Chinese thought of Obama's election, and said "It is a miracle," thinks of Donald Trump's ascent.]
Even after nearly eight years in office, Europeans hold a mostly favorable image of America's 44th president. Some 77 percent of Europeans have confidence in Obama to do the right thing in world affairs, according to a Pew Research study this past summer.
The same study found that 59 percent of Europeans had confidence in Clinton compared to only 9 percent who had similar esteem for Trump.
If there were any doubts about the direction the second US presidential debate was going to take on Sunday night, they were dispelled an hour before show-time, when Donald Trump held an impromptu press conference with women who have accused Bill Clinton of sexual assault.
The striking thing is that while the former president's sexual history was broached by the Republican, it probably wasn't the most eye-popping, norm-breaking moment of the debate.
That, instead, came when Mr Trump said that Hillary Clinton feared his presidency because his election would lead to her imprisonment.
While Mr Trump's embrace of "lock her up" rhetoric received the lion's share of condemnation from the left and the right, that debate moment likely won't have the greatest impact on the final month of the campaign. That (dubious) honour goes to his assertion that his secretly recorded discussion of how he made unwelcome advances on women was "just talk".
The Trump campaign has promised that it will release evidence that the accusers are fabricating their claims - and Mr Trump in several speeches has issued blanket denials. So far, however, the sum total of evidence levelled against the growing list of women coming forward is a discussion of the mobility of airline armrests, an insistence that Mr Trump wouldn't have enough private time with the women in question to do anything untoward and, most amazingly, Mr Trump's own assertion that one of the women wasn't attractive enough to catch his eye.
"Believe me, she would not be my first choice," he said at a North Carolina rally on Friday.
Believe me, that line isn't going to win him any votes.
It turns out presidential campaigns, like sausage, aren't things anyone wants to watch being made.
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His campaign, he said, is at war with "a global power structure that is responsible for the economic decisions that have robbed our working class, stripped our country of its wealth and put that money into the pockets of a handful of large corporations and political entities."
Mr Trump's latest remarks have some commentators saying he's moved from anti-Semitic dog whistles to a fully fledged bullhorn.
President Barack Obama's election, and his eight years in office, impressed many people abroad who had lost hope in the American political system during the deeply unpopular years of George W. Bush.
"I've lived in America before for a number of years and I was pretty impressed when they elected Obama. I saw that as a step forward," said Maureen Cole-Burns outside the House of Commons.
Trump's rise to within striking distance of the White House, she said, was like "two steps back."
[I can only imagine what my Chinese interpreter Kitty, who turned to me face-to-face in a cab in Beijing when I asked her what Chinese thought of Obama's election, and said "It is a miracle," thinks of Donald Trump's ascent.]
Even after nearly eight years in office, Europeans hold a mostly favorable image of America's 44th president. Some 77 percent of Europeans have confidence in Obama to do the right thing in world affairs, according to a Pew Research study this past summer.
The same study found that 59 percent of Europeans had confidence in Clinton compared to only 9 percent who had similar esteem for Trump.
US election 2016: Presidential race goes down the drain
If there were any doubts about the direction the second US presidential debate was going to take on Sunday night, they were dispelled an hour before show-time, when Donald Trump held an impromptu press conference with women who have accused Bill Clinton of sexual assault.
The striking thing is that while the former president's sexual history was broached by the Republican, it probably wasn't the most eye-popping, norm-breaking moment of the debate.
That, instead, came when Mr Trump said that Hillary Clinton feared his presidency because his election would lead to her imprisonment.
While Mr Trump's embrace of "lock her up" rhetoric received the lion's share of condemnation from the left and the right, that debate moment likely won't have the greatest impact on the final month of the campaign. That (dubious) honour goes to his assertion that his secretly recorded discussion of how he made unwelcome advances on women was "just talk".
The Trump campaign has promised that it will release evidence that the accusers are fabricating their claims - and Mr Trump in several speeches has issued blanket denials. So far, however, the sum total of evidence levelled against the growing list of women coming forward is a discussion of the mobility of airline armrests, an insistence that Mr Trump wouldn't have enough private time with the women in question to do anything untoward and, most amazingly, Mr Trump's own assertion that one of the women wasn't attractive enough to catch his eye.
"Believe me, she would not be my first choice," he said at a North Carolina rally on Friday.
Believe me, that line isn't going to win him any votes.
It turns out presidential campaigns, like sausage, aren't things anyone wants to watch being made.
...
His campaign, he said, is at war with "a global power structure that is responsible for the economic decisions that have robbed our working class, stripped our country of its wealth and put that money into the pockets of a handful of large corporations and political entities."
Mr Trump's latest remarks have some commentators saying he's moved from anti-Semitic dog whistles to a fully fledged bullhorn.
