"And Samson took hold of the two middle pillars upon which the house stood, and on which it was borne up, of the one with his right hand, and of the other with his left. And Samson said, Let me die with the Philistines. And he bowed himself with all his might; and the house fell upon the lords, and upon all the people that were therein. So the dead which he slew at his death were more than they which he slew in his life."

—Judges 16: 29-30

ST. LOUIS, MISSOURI—Well, I hate to say I told you so, but, dammit, I told you so. Way back in 2013, I told you this was coming, that the unquiet ghosts of the Great Penis Hunt of the 1990s were awaiting only a sorcerer well enough versed in the dark arts to bring them forth upon the land again. Little did I know that they would be summoned not only to destroy Hillary Rodham Clinton, but also by a near-suicidal Republican presidential campaign willing to bring the temple down on its own head as long as the party establishment died under the rubble as well.

There is no modern parallel to what Donald Trump did prior to Sunday night's debate. Seated in a room in a luxury hotel that looked like nothing more than the town council chamber in a backwater Rust Belt town, El Caudillo del Mar-A-Lago hosted a bizarre photo-op with three of Bill Clinton's most famous accusers, Juanita Broaddrick, Paula Jones, and Kathleen Willey, as well as Kathy Shelton, who was raped when she was 12 by a man who later became a client of young lawyer Hillary Rodham Clinton. From NBC News:

"Mr. Trump may have said some bad words, but Bill Clinton raped me and Hillary Clinton threatened me. I don't think there's anything worse," Broaddrick said. Trump told reporters the four women had asked to be present for the panel, which was billed to the press as part of Trump's preparation for the debate. Broaddrick, Wiley and Jones will all be in the debate hall tonight, a Trump aide confirmed. Trump did not respond to a reporter who shouted a question to Trump about whether he believes his star power allows him to touch women without their consent.

Thus was democracy rendered a shambles, once again, by a vulgar talking yam who speaks for far too many of his fellow citizens. And let us pause in our chortling to remember that, to a substantial percentage of the people in the country, this event was absolutely the balls. For a considerable number of them, it was an orgasmic celebration of the impeachment interruptus in which, they believe, Bill Clinton beat the rap.

In short, Trump may have managed throughout the night to stop Republicans from running away into the night, screaming. They still may abandon him, but they'll slip silently away in the darkness, like deserters from the Confederate army heading for the hills. On Sunday night, he solidified his base the only way that his base can be solidified—with bullying, bluster, and an amazing ability not to know dick about so many of the important issues of the day. And he left us all with one amazing, indelible moment.

CLINTON: I told people it would be impossible be fact checking all the the time—I'd never get to talk about anything I want to do or how we're going to make lives better for people. So go to HillaryClinton.com. You can fact check him in real time, last time at the first debate, we had millions of people fact checking, so expect we'll have millions more fact checking. It's just awfully good that someone with the temperament of Donald Trump is not in charge of the law of our country.

TRUMP: Because you'd be in jail.

Even for a guy who spent the first quarter of the encounter talking in fluent 4-chan, this was a startling bit of business, the first time in American political history that one candidate promised to throw the other candidate in jail. It should be the only thing anyone talks about until the next debate. No arrest. No indictment. No trial. No conviction. Just, "You'd be in jail." And he got enough of a cheer in the hall that Anderson Cooper screwed on his stern librarian face and told people to shut up. I'm telling you, for somewhere between 37 and 42 percent of your fellow Americans, the earth moved at that moment.

In truth, while Trump took the debate into the sewer early, by talking at length about his Special Guest Stars and the perfidy of both Clintons, he didn't stay there long, which I guess counts as something of an improvement in his debating style. And he did seem to throw Clinton off-balance. Maybe it was the Undead of the Starr Report. Maybe it was Trump's alpha-male strutting around the stage, but Clinton had moments when she was uncertain and overly prolix. When Martha Raddatz brought up the recent WikiLeaks publication of what purport to be the speeches she gave to various Wall Street gombeens, Clinton got completely lost in the fog.

Raddatz: I want to move on. This next question from the public through the bipartisan Open Debate, where Americans submitted questions that generated millions of votes. It was reported that excerpts of secretary Clinton's paid speeches, in which she has refused to release, and one line, in which you say you need both a public and private position on certain issues. So, Tu (ph), from Virginia asks, Is it okay for politicians to be two-faced? Is it acceptable for a politician to have a private stance?

CLINTON: Right, as I recall, that was something I said about Abraham Lincoln, and after having seen the wonderful Steven Spielberg movie called Lincoln. It was a master class watching President Lincoln get the Congress to approve the 13th Amendment. It was principled and strategic. I was making the point that it is hard sometimes to get the Congress to do what you want to do. To keep working at it. And yes, President Lincoln was trying to convince some people to use some arguments. That was a great, I thought, a great display of presidential leadership.

Getty Images

I know what point she was making. In order to get big things done, sometimes, presidents have to be deft at moving the pea around under the shells. She used Lincoln's finessing the 13th Amendment through Congress, but a better example is Franklin Roosevelt and Lend Lease. Anyway, whatever its merits, Clinton simply couldn't bottle the answer.

And then she went on to point out that the American intelligence community has said explicitly that "the Kremlin" is trying to monkeywrench the election, which is true, but which also is not a denial that she said what the documents say that she said, and then pivoted again, clumsily, to Trump's reluctance to release his tax returns. Gifted with a lovely opportunity, Trump fell on his face. He basically accused the American intelligence community of lying to benefit the Clinton campaign.

TRUMP: I notice anytime anything wrong happens, they like to say the Russians—she doesn't know if it's the Russians doing the hacking. Maybe there is no hacking. But they always blame Russia and the reason is because they think they're trying to tarnish me with Russia. I know about Russia but I know nothing about the inner workings of Russia. I have no businesses. I have no loans from Russia.

He then got in a plug for his new hotel in Washington.

At this point, the debate spun off into parallel universes. Trump beat his chest, waved his dick, and basically talked to the people he's been talking to for going on three years. He had a good moment punching away at Clinton on her e-mails, and then defused the whole thing by slipping into Whiny Twerp mode and bleating about how unfair the moderators were. He doubled back on his remarkably stupid argument that we should have launched a "sneak attack" on Mosul.

TRUMP: The biggest problem I have with the stupidity of our foreign policy, we have Mosul. We have ... coming out of Washington and Iraq, we will be attacking mosul in three or four weeks. All of these bad leaders from ISIS are leaving Mosul. Why can't they do it quietly? Why can't they do the attack, make it a sneak attack and after the attack is made, inform the American public that we've knocked out the leaders, we've had a tremendous success. People leave. Why do they have to say we're going to be attacking mosul within the next four to six weeks which is what they're saying. How stupid is our country.

Moderator Martha Raddatz, who's seen more combat than Trump has allegedly groped starlets, at this point appeared to be looking around for a RPG launcher to end this whole exercise.

And, on the subject of healthcare, this is what he said. I quote it in full in the hope that somebody, somewhere, can figure out what in the name of Hippocrates the man is talking about, because I took a wrong turn somewhere in the second sentence and had to sleep under a tree for the rest of the night.

TRUMP: I'll tell you. You're going to have plans that are so good because we're going to have some competition. Once we break out the lines and allow the competition to come.

COOPER: Are you going to have a mandate that Americans have to have health insurance?

TRUMP: President Obama by keeping those—and it was almost gone until just right toward the end of the passage of Obamacare, which was a fraud. You know that, because Jonathan Gruber, the architect of Obamacare, said it was a great lie. It was big lie. President Obama said you keep your plan, the whole thing was a fraud and it doesn't work. When we get rid of those lines, you have competition and we'll be able to keep preexisting and help people that can't get, don't have money because we are going to have people protected. And Republicans feel this way. Believe it or not and strongly this way. We're going to block grant. Into the states. Block grant into medicaid. So we will be able to take care of people without the necessary funds to take care of themselves.

The one identifiable idea in that mess—block-granting Medicaid to the states—is appallingly bad. (Sure, let's give Pat McCrory in North Carolina some Medicaid money to fund his stupid lawsuits defending his stupid laws, or to Scott Walker in Wisconsin, to dole it out to the penny-ante cronies with whom he surrounds himself.) As for the rest of it, I'm not sure, but I don't think Donald Trump believes that states have actual borders.

As for HRC, she was herself. She was dogged, determined, and talking to whomever out there was looking for a president and not for a carnival act. She spoke long and earnestly about the situation in Syria. (Pro Tip: Nobody in or out of American government knows fck-all how to deal with that ongoing humanitarian disaster.) She had a fine, extended colloquy linking Trump's ghastly remarks on Access Hollywood to the rest of his long record of inflammatory blather.

CLINTON: And he has said that the video doesn't represent who he is. But I think it's clear to anyone who heard it that it represents exactly what he is. Because we've seen this throughout the campaign. We have seen him insult women. We've seen him rate women. On their appearance. Ranking them from one to 10. We've seen him embarrass women on TV and on Twitter. We saw him after the first debate spend nearly a week denigrating a former Miss Universe in the harshest, most personal terms, so, yes, this is who Donald Trump is. But it's not only women and it's not only this video that raises questions about his fitness to be our president.

She'll never be quick. You will always come up with snappier comebacks from your sofa than she will on the stage. But she presses, presses, presses, and, given her opponent in this great sucking mire of an election, that is the perfect approach to take. If the best that can be said for your opponent is that, on this night, he was insane, but manageable, then dogged and determined, and simply knowing what you're talking about, goes a long, long way.

Of course, after the debate, the Trump campaign trotted out its surrogates and the whole thing went to the zoo all over again. The four Clinton Accusers made the rounds of the Spin Room. (Dear Commission on Presidential Debates: Why?) Kellyanne Conway went on with Chris Matthews and tried to spin the Access Hollywood taping by explaining that the halls of Congress are not dissimilar to that scene in Roman Polanski's Repulsion where all the hands come out of the wall to grab Catherine Deneuve.

"When I was younger and prettier, them rubbing up against girls, sticking their tongues down young women's throats… And some of them, by the way," she added, "are on the list of people who won't support Donald Trump 'cause they all ride around on a high horse."

Holy hell. It's like a stickier version of Joe McCarthy. "Senator, are you now or have you ever been a throat-diver?" And, speaking of a stickier brand of McCarthyism, Rudy Giuliani dropped by MSNBC to lend his unique brand of insight to close out the evening.

"THERE WAS SEMEN ON HER DRESS!"

Jesus Christ, get the net.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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