Todd S. Purdum is senior writer at Politico and contributing editor for Vanity Fair, as well as author of An Idea Whose Time Has Come: Two Presidents, Two Parties and the Battle for the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Donald Trump tried hard to get back on track Monday. In an impressive display of discipline for a candidate who in recent weeks has been busy vindicating Hillary Clinton’s barb that he can be “baited” by any tweet, Trump grimaced in the face of protests but gamely went on discussing his economic plans during a speech at the Detroit Economic Club. Trump didn’t even respond when one demonstrator shouted: "All you got is tiny hands!"

But if you were thinking this was the start of a “normal” presidential campaign, forget it. In his speech Trump glanced over the issues—giving very few details—and mostly attacked Clinton personally, blaming her for Detroit’s plight (even though her former boss, Barack Obama, bailed out the auto industry against GOP opposition).


And that’s really the only thing that remains on track in this campaign. To judge by the daily parade of headlines and sound bites, the 2016 presidential election has boiled down to one steaming mass of invective, calumny, character assassination and contempt: the madman versus the prevaricator, the bully versus the biddy, the devil you know vs. the devil you don’t.

Especially after last week, when everyone from President Barack Obama to former acting CIA Director Michael Morell called Trump unfit for the presidency, it looks as if this election won’t be focused on issues much longer. It’s going to a battle of the allegedly crazy (Trump) versus the putatively criminal (Clinton). Personal stuff. So central has the fitness issue become that Trump is now trying to apply the same label to Clinton, calling her “totally unbalanced” during a rally Saturday night, a day after Clinton said she “short-circuited” in an answer she gave about her emails. "I think the people of this country don’t want somebody who’s going to short-circuit up here," Trump said at a rally in Windham, New Hampshire.

But Trump is fighting a rather lonely battle on that score. In recent days even more Republican establishment figures have come out against him. Once again, they say he's simply not fit for the Oval Office.

American history is rife with examples of uncivil discourse. Abraham Lincoln’s own commanding general, George B. McClellan, once called him “the original gorilla.” Theodore Roosevelt dismissed President Benjamin Harrison as “a cold-blooded, narrow-minded, prejudiced, obstinate, timid old psalm-singing Indianapolis politician.” In 1960, Harry Truman denounced Richard Nixon as “a no good lying bastard” and said that anyone who voted for him “ought to go to hell.”

And it doesn’t take a pollster or a pundit to know that winning the presidency has sometimes—maybe even often— hinged more on questions of the candidates’ character, temperament and personality (and the shorthand caricatures of same) than on their stances on the issues of the day—however grave or challenging.

But when a pre-adolescent boy at a Trump rally in Virginia can yell, “Take the bitch down!” and his mother’s defense is, “Children will be children”—and the sitting president feels compelled to describe a would-be successor as actually unfit for the office—it seems beyond dispute that the country has reached some kind of new low.

Or as Sam Sanders of NPR’s election unit tweeted in awe last Tuesday: “In last 24 hrs GOP presidential nominee called Dem nominee the devil & the sitting president called the GOP nom unfit 2 b president.”

“This is a madcap election,” says the historian Robert Dallek. “It’s hard to remember a moment like this,” adds David Axelrod, the veteran Democratic strategist who has been following politics since he perched on a mailbox as a 5-year-old boy and watched JFK campaign in Manhattan in 1960.

Indeed, this season’s sulfurous dialogue seems to go well beyond the typical mix of scripted insults, poll-tested put-downs and unauthorized surrogates’ trash talk that has become par for the course in modern politics. That is at least partly because the candidates themselves have been willing to engage so directly in an unusually sharp exchange of insults.

Near the end of the 1992 presidential campaign, when an exasperated George H.W. Bush lashed out at Bill Clinton and Al Gore on a campaign swing through Iowa by declaring, “My dog Millie knows more about foreign policy than these two bozos!” the outburst was widely seen as less than presidential. The New York Times foreign affairs columnist Leslie Gelb countered that some of President Bush’s own foreign policy ventures “approach or cross the line into bozocraft.”

But Bush’s attack reads like a quaint lace valentine, compared with this year’s oratory.

Trump has called Clinton “guilty as hell” for her use of a private email server as secretary of state, and insisted she “has to go to jail.” For her part, Clinton has said of Trump, “Somebody who attacks everybody has something missing,” — implying that her opponent lacks at least a psychological screw or two.

To be clear: The candidates’ brands of invective are not equivalent. Nothing can quite compare with Trump’s endless—and seemingly spontaneous—flow of crude characterizations of anyone who would cross him. For better or worse, Clinton’s attacks are much subtler, and probably more strategic, since her own high negative poll ratings make it imperative that she portray Trump as so unpredictable, and even unstable, as to be an unacceptable choice for president.

And Clinton’s attacks seem to be sticking. The new Washington Post-ABC News poll out Sunday has Clinton ahead of Trump by 8 points—twice the 4-point advantage the Democrats held on the eve of the Republican convention in mid-July. Just as devastatingly, almost 6 in 10 voters say Trump is not qualified to be president, unchanged from before his convention. Trump is even losing college-educated white voters, with whom Clinton now has a 50-to-44 advantage. Surveys in critical battleground states come out just as badly for the GOP nominee: A recent poll by The Detroit News and WDIV-TV found that 3 in 5 likely voters in Michigan do not believe Trump is qualified to be president. In New Hampshire, a poll by WBUR radio, a Boston NPR affiliate, found that 6 in 10 likely voters view Trump as unqualified for the presidency, while nearly 5 in 10 likely voters say Clinton would be.

All that suggests that the insult trading will continue, and perhaps even intensify, throughout the fall campaign. The criticism of Trump from his fellow Republicans over the fitness issue has been of particular note. No less a famously self-destructive politician than Newt Gingrich—seen only a few weeks ago as a Trump booster and vice presidential prospect—marveled aloud last week at Trump’s “very self-destructive” behavior. Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) said he cannot support Trump because “I’m an American before I’m a Republican.” Longtime GOP strategist Mike Murphy, who ran Jeb Bush’s super PAC, has likened Trump to “the drunk uncle doing the wedding toast.”

Such internecine warfare is far from unprecedented. The GOP’s nomination of the regular Republican James Blaine in 1884 so outraged the party’s reform element that they questioned whether Blaine should be “honored with the presidency when his mere nomination has so shamefully lowered the moral tone of the party,” and the convention that chose him was described as a “mass meeting of maniacs.”

Establishment Republicans, including such luminaries as President Charles Eliot of Harvard, former Senator and Interior Secretary Carl Schurz and the clergyman and social reformer Henry Ward Beecher, rallied around the Democratic nominee, Grover Cleveland. They became known “Mugwumps,” from the old Algonquin Indian term for “chief.”

In 1928, anti-Catholic opponents of the Democratic nominee, Al Smith, flooded the country with picture of New York’s newly completed Holland Tunnel, with captions claiming it would be the passageway from the White House to the Vatican, and a cartoon circulated of what purported to be a Smith Cabinet meeting, with the Pope seated at the head of the table.

In 1948, Truman lit into the Republicans as they were about to gather for their nominating convention, saying that the GOP delegates were “going down to Philadelphia in a few days and are going to tell you what a great Congress they’ve been. Well if you believe that, you are bigger suckers than I think you are.”

Nor is it unheard of to suggest—as some Trump critics have—that his call for Russia to hack and find Clinton’s missing State Department emails amounted to an act of treason (Trump later said he was being “sarcastic”). At the height of the McCarthy era, GOP Sen. William Jenner of Indiana opposed retired Gen. George C. Marshall’s nomination as secretary of defense, accusing him of being “a living lie” and “eager to play the role of a front man for traitors.”

For months this year, some longtime Clinton advisers have worried privately that Trump is so unpredictable—and so unbridled—that he might manage to rattle the fiercely linear and disciplined Clinton in a one-on-one debate, simply by saying something so outrageous that she would be at a loss to respond effectively. It now seems at least as possible that the reverse could be true. In fact, part of Clinton’s current strategy seems to be to needle Trump into launching one attack more outré than the last.

“A man you can bait with a tweet is not a man we can trust with nuclear weapons,” Clinton said in accepting the Democratic nomination in Philadelphia, in an obvious bid to paint Trump as small, and small-minded. Her opponent responded by … allowing himself to be repeatedly baited.

Polls have shown that upward of one quarter of voters say they chose their presidential candidate primarily on the basis of the nominee’s character and moral values, so there is cold logic behind Trump and Clinton’s consistent efforts to demonize each other. Social science research has generally found that negative attacks work, in the sense that they can be effective in taking down an opponent, but also that they tend to turn people off from politics, and to further shrink and polarize the electorate.

The real question for Clinton and Trump in November is how best to attack each other without also hurting themselves in the bargain. By the conventional rules of politics, Clinton would so far seem to have the upper hand at the moment. But Trump’s candidacy is vivid proof that 2016 is anything but a conventional year, so the tone will probably get nastier before it gets nicer in the weeks to come.