“WE LIVE in a world that has walls. And those walls have to be guarded by men with guns,” snarls the demonic Colonel Jessep at the end of “A Few Good Men”. Moments later he admits that, to maintain standards in his front-line unit, he ordered the fatal bullying of a young Marine: “You’re goddamn right I did.” It is one of cinema’s great confession scenes, and unexpectedly came to mind during the first presidential debate at Hofstra University on Long Island, on September 26th.

Time and again Donald Trump was baited by Hillary Clinton into outbursts of Jessep-like candour. Reminded that in 2006 he had wished aloud for the property crash that would cost millions their homes, deeming such a slump a chance to “make some money”, Mr Trump leaned to the mic and growled: “That’s called business, by the way.” Another rash boast concerned Mr Trump’s refusal to release his tax returns. Perhaps, Mrs Clinton mused, her rival does not want Americans to know that he is not as rich as he claims, or that in the only annual returns that he has ever made public (while seeking a casino licence), he paid no federal income taxes. “That makes me smart,” snapped Mr Trump.

What about Mr Trump’s reputation for refusing to pay contractors in full after they install marble in his hotels, or design his latest golf course, Mrs Clinton demanded to know? Why, she told her opponent, in a small flourish of political theatre, an architect whom you failed to pay is in the debate audience tonight. Mr Trump scoffed: “Maybe he didn’t do a good job.” He was as defiant when the moderator, Lester Holt of NBC television, asked what he would say to non-white Americans after years of promoting the racially charged conspiracy theory that President Barack Obama was not born in America. “I say nothing,” retorted Mr Trump, instead praising himself for forcing Mr Obama to release his long-form birth certificate in 2011.

The surface explanation is that Mr Trump is too thin-skinned to help himself. Certainly Mrs Clinton provoked her opponent masterfully. She cast him as a child of privilege, bankrolled with millions from his late father’s property empire (which was sued for racial discrimination, she noted). This worked, up to a point. A distracted Mr Trump used debating time to quibble about his father’s generosity—“a very small loan”. In an ambush that was still generating headlines days later, Mrs Clinton reminded him of his insults towards a woman in a beauty contest that he oversaw, whom he mocked as “Miss Piggy” and, allegedly because she is Latina, as “Miss Housekeeping”.

Mr Trump’s nastiness helped Mrs Clinton all the more because she did not make the best use of her own speaking time, too often reciting wish-lists of policies as if reading the minutes from a committee meeting. In part, she waffled because she has some real political vulnerabilities. Mr Trump was effective (if wrong in his economic analysis) when he attacked Mrs Clinton in harsh, simple terms for supporting the NAFTA trade pact with Mexico and Canada in the 1990s, and for initially endorsing a big new push for a Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) opening up trade with Asia-Pacific countries. Mr Trump accused Mrs Clinton of turning against the TPP after hearing him criticise the deal. The sad reality, for free-trade advocates, is that Mrs Clinton was not just frightened by Trump rallies in rustbelt swing states. She also ran scared of the TPP-bashing wing of her own party, stirred up by the old leftist who made her Democratic presidential primary such a slog, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont.

But there is a deeper explanation for Mr Trump’s willingness to admit to dodging taxes and bilking small contractors. Though the businessman lacks the medals and the coiled-spring physique of the fictional Colonel Jessep (played by a wolfish Jack Nicholson), both men confess out of defiant pride, not shame. Both prize their personal codes of hyper-masculine, authoritarian success above the complaints of soft, hand-wringing critics. And both love walls. “You fuckin’ people. You have no idea how to defend a nation,” spits the colonel at his tormentors, a team of city-dwelling, highly educated military lawyers. More important, many Trump supporters would cheer that sentiment. It is one reason why they forgive their candidate, though they hardly love all rich men who avoid taxes, or rip off small businesses.

What makes a good man, anyway?

The first presidential debate exposed, with unhappy clarity, how the candidates are speaking to two different Americas. The Trump and Clinton coalitions do not just disagree about tax rates or health policy. Their worlds hardly overlap. Among white men without college degrees, Mr Trump leads Mrs Clinton four-to-one, while she leads him among non-whites by three-to-one. Among college-educated white women (normally a swing voter bloc), Mrs Clinton has an almost two-to-one edge. Vitally, their coalitions subscribe to different value systems. To Mr Trump and his backers, politicians like Mrs Clinton have allowed jobs to be stolen, let murderous immigrants and terrorists stream across open borders, and spent American blood and treasure on naive attempts at nation-building in far-flung corners of an ungrateful world. And by failing to secure America, such self-dealing, rotten elites have lost the right to be heard on any other subject. Meanwhile, in pressing the case that Mr Trump is guilty of racism and sexism, Mrs Clinton is appealing to slices of the electorate that she needs in her corner—black voters, Hispanics, young people and college-educated whites—and whose moral code says that an unrepentant bigot can hardly claim to be a good person.

Colonel Jessep meets a satisfying fate, raging as he is led away by grim-faced military police. But that is because in court, laws beat personal honour codes. No consensus exists among American voters about what qualifies a leader to rule. Whoever wins the 2016 election, half the country will think them a disgrace on Day One. This is a drama with no neat ending.