"Will you shut up, man!"

Barely 20 minutes into the debate, Joe Biden, speaking for 60 per cent of Americans, exclaimed in utter exasperation, “Will you shut up, man!”

Though the two candidates stood under a grand banner of a bald eagle and the motto “The Union and the Constitution Forever,” this chaotic spectacle was not remotely like any campaign event in American history. It wasn’t a debate, it was a grownup trying to get a word in while a superannuated toddler pitched a tantrum.

Given Trump’s ability to reduce everything he touches to a stinking mass of rubble, this moment was doomed from the start. Before anybody even showed up in Cleveland, Trump accused Joe Biden of taking “performance-enhancing drugs” and demanded he be tested. Biden’s deputy campaign manager, Kate Bedingfield, replied, “Vice President Biden intends to deliver his debate answers in words. “If,”she said, “the president thinks his best case is made in urine he can have at it. We’d expect nothing less from Donald Trump, who pissed away the chance to protect the lives of 200,000 Americans when he didn’t make a plan to stop COVID-19.”

Moderator Chris Wallace struggled manfully to get the emotionally incontinent president to stop interrupting, stop taunting, and stick to the subject, with pretty much zero success. The result was an unedifying spectacle, but then, what did we expect — the Oxford Union on its best night? There was little news made in this verbal brawl, and little to uplift the nation, but there were, not highlights exactly, perhaps what we might call startling moments. Trump crowed over his uber-conservative Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett, reminding the nation, “We won the election” as a way of justifying the unseemly haste of her confirmation process so close to an election. It also ignored the hypocrisy of Republicans refusing to even interview Barack Obama’s choice for the high court in 2016, though there was nearly a year left in his term.

Americans who hoped to hear something useful about the candidates’s plans for the health system were treated instead to Donald Trump calling Joe Biden a “socialist.” When Biden insisted he’d keep private insurance, Trump sneered, “You’ve just lost the Left.” Things went downhill from there. Sometimes there was no untangling the discourse as three grown men talked over each other, though Biden mostly stood back, smiling somewhat sorrowfully, being the adult in the room. Trump became increasingly loud, bullying and, frankly deranged, constantly interrupting Biden as well as the moderator, who scolded and cajoled in vain. The epic prevarication for which Trump has become justly famous accelerated like a supermarket cart full of vodka bottles turned loose at the top of a steep hill, rattling all the way down. Or, to quote CNN presenter Jake Tapper: “That wasn’t a debate. That was a hot mess inside a dumpster fire inside a train wreck.”

Trump taunted Joe Biden for wearing a mask (in the middle of a global pandemic, fancy that) and refusing to hold huge rallies — also known as super-spreader events — claiming that “you’d only get three people” (even though Biden leads Trump in all the polls). Trump managed to insult Biden’s dead son, who served in Iraq, as well as his surviving son, who has struggled with drug addiction. From declaring — weirdly — that Biden would “not have made ventilators” to his claim that the fires destroying millions of acres on the west coast happened because nobody swept the forest floor clean, the president kept the real-time fact-checkers in a state of frenzied correction.

With Trump it’s easy to get caught up in his constant and indiscriminate dung-hurling. He demanded credit for “bringing back college football,” (sure, Boss whatever you say) and insisted that he paid “millions” in income taxes, even though the New York Times has shown that’s wildly off the mark. He also claimed that Joe Biden’s son took illicit millions from shady Ukrainian gazillionaires and mysterious Russians — an allegation that has been recently (and reluctantly) debunked by a Republican-dominated senate investigation.

But there were also some seriously chilling moments. Trump never uttered a word of sympathy to the families of the 206,000 Americans dead of the coronavirus, nor did he show any remorse for his lack of leadership in this health crisis. As he once said, “It is what it is.” Worse, when asked to condemn white supremacy, he smirked, pretending he didn’t know what the moderator was talking about, then when presented with the example of the Proud Boys, a hate-filled gaggle of violent neo-fascists in Ralph Lauren polo shirts, Trump shrugged and told them to both “stand down” but also to “stand by.”

That the President of the United States could not bring himself to abjure racist thugs should be the headline of this appalling display. Nevertheless, Biden managed to get in a few decent lines, such as that under Trump, “America has become weaker, sicker, poorer and more divided.” On Trump’s cavalier attitude toward the pandemic which has upended the world, Biden mocked him: “It is what it is because you are who you are.” And OK, Biden also called Trump a “clown” and “Putin’s puppy,” which might not seem too “presidential, but then, when Trump attacked Biden’s family, the former vice-president refused to reply in kind, turning to the camera to remind viewers (if there were any left by that time) that this shouldn’t be about his family or Trump’s, but your family, America, your pain, your problems. It was a moment of bracing decency in a 90 minute food fight.

There are supposed to be two more debates before November 3^rd. Though the twitterverse blazed with pundits, supporters and others representing the saner segment of the American population begging Biden to cancel, his campaign says he’s happy to go another couple of rounds with Trump. While it’s reassuring that Biden can hang tough, I’m not sure the rest of us can stomach another night like this.