Alicia Machado, a former Miss Universe, campaigns for Hillary Clinton in August. Photograph: MPI10 / MediaPunch/IPX/AP

Hillary Clinton, who is the first woman ever to take the Presidential debate stage in the general election, has come to represent the comic figure of the overqualified woman beset by laughably high levels of sexism. “Finally, the whole country will watch as a woman stands politely listening to a loud man’s bad ideas about the field she spent her life in,” the Washington Post writer Alexandra Petri tweeted yesterday, before the two candidates took the stage. “Viewers Impressed By How Male Trump Looked During Debate,” a headline on the Onion ran. On Monday morning, MSNBC ran two preview graphics about the candidates’ debate objectives. Clinton, the graphic declared, should add levity, sell herself, and “be the Clinton who shines in a smaller room.” Trump, meanwhile, should “fill in the gaps in his policy proposals,” “show humility,” and “stop lying.” And even though Clinton hit those targets while Trump failed to meet the inch-high expectations, NBC News’s political director, Chuck Todd, still said, on a “Meet the Press” postmortem, that Clinton—whose first name had been misspelled on the official debate ticket—seemed “overprepared.”

With forty-one days to go, the election still seems to be centered more on representation than on ideology. The debate reinforced that framing, with Trump vs. Clinton offered to viewers as a wrestling match or a battle-of-the-sexes piece of workplace reality TV. We probably shouldn’t be surprised that it was the highest-rated Presidential debate in history.

Throughout, Trump spoke like a man who, when he deigns to be silent, imagines it as a kingly act of generosity, and who views women in power like a peculiar species of talking dog. When he first called his opponent “Secretary Clinton,” he asked her, condescendingly, if that term was O.K. “I want you to be very happy,” he said. “It’s very important to me.” He interrupted Clinton twenty-nine times, honking out “Wrong!” when she proffered easily verifiable facts about his record. According to the Times, he dodged four questions and was fact-checked five times by the moderator; Clinton dodged nothing and did not once require fact-checking.

And yet the Trump onstage was no different from the Trump who has won the support of nearly half the country. If he loses ground now, it will surely be because of his embarrassing defensiveness, which has not, up until now, received the uninterrupted airtime that it got last night. His supporters seem to prefer him on offense, displaying his callous, me-first aggression—the quality that, last night, made him nonchalantly admit to, and then justify, paying no federal income taxes, and to interject “That’s called business” when Clinton pointed out that, in 2006, he’d rooted for the impending housing crisis. What some of us think of as unpardonable, uncivil, and unhealthy behavior is, to part of the national community we live in, exactly what’s required for America to make it.

Nonetheless, the limits of disrespect as political praxis became strikingly visible on the Trump vs. Clinton split screen. Trump’s mode of operation is gender-specific: he scoffed, shouted, and simpered in a way that is unimaginable for Clinton, who remained, as she was required to, wry and collected. (Conversely, if Trump had mustered a tenth of her composure, I imagine the post-debate polling would have gifted him a “win.”) Trump’s obsession with disrespect extends to positioning himself as a victim in the scheme of problems that he’s created: “I should be complaining,” he said, when Lester Holt asked him about his refusal to release his tax returns. “I get audited by the I.R.S., but other people don’t.” When Clinton brought up the Trump organization’s long history of stiffed employees, Trump attempted, once again, to make himself the wronged party: maybe he hadn’t paid them because they’d done bad work, he said. They had actually cheated him.

Toward the end, Holt brought up an incident from early September in which Trump told ABC’s David Muir that Clinton didn’t have a “Presidential look.” Trump attempted to swerve toward the subject of “stamina.” But Clinton brought it back to Trump’s obsession with women’s looks—an issue on which she can speak with unique credibility, having been disrespected for reasons now widely understood as sexist in the course of her entire political career. She had at the ready the story of Alicia Machado, a former Miss Universe winner, whom Trump had called “Miss Piggy” when she gained weight after her victory, as well as “Miss Housekeeping,” an apparent reference to her being Latina. As documented in a Clinton campaign ad that’s been widely shared since the debate, Trump, in the nineties, brought TV reporters to watch Machado exercise, and gave cruel interviews about her weight.

When charged directly and accurately with sexism, Trump congratulated himself for the restraint he was displaying. Since his opponent had started getting so unfair and nasty, he said, he was prepared to say something “extremely rough to Hillary, to her family” in return—but he’d changed his mind, because “it’s not nice.”

But the next morning, in an interview on “Fox & Friends,” Trump seemed to remember his greatest advantage: unlike his opponent, he is not required to be nice. In fact, many of his supporters prefer it when he isn’t. So he brought up Clinton’s “husband’s women,” and suggested that Bill Clinton’s extramarital affairs would be fair game. He also dismissed Machado, evincing an unshakable faith in the idea that this woman—A beauty contestant! From Venezuela!—was beneath him. Machado had an “attitude,” he said, and she really had “gained a massive amount of weight, and it was a real problem.” Hillary was talking about her “like she was Mother Teresa, and it wasn’t quite that way,” he added. “But it was O.K. Hillary has to do what she has to do.”

What Hillary actually has to do—and what she has done so far—is make an excruciating series of adjustments around the reality that her opponent’s sexism and racism, his petulance and unbalanced demeanor, have not sunk him, and have, in all likelihood, helped him along. But when the two candidates are next to each other, Clinton’s surreal, specific disadvantages in this Presidential race start to pay out their own dividends. Although she would never talk about it in the way that Trump discusses the victimization of being audited, Clinton carries the ever-expanding knowledge of what it’s like to be dismissed, disrespected, and treated unfairly. A recent Washington Post story reported an anecdote from a close friend of Clinton’s: when she was First Lady, a staffer read aloud a magazine’s allegations that she’d had sex with a colleague; Clinton, at first, heard the word “collie,” and began to cry. “That’s how far down her expectations had gone of what people thought she was capable of,” the friend said. Trump’s candidacy may be anomalous, but his tactics, for Clinton, are predictable, even familiar. This is precisely why she was so calm and steely last night—so Presidential. It’s why she can express genuine solidarity with people like Alicia Machado, people whom Trump can barely see.

Read more about the first debate: John Cassidy on Donald Trump’s self-inflicted errors, Amy Davidson on how Trump failed to bully Clinton, Benjamin Wallace-Wells on how Clinton turned Trump into Mitt Romney, and Jill Lepore on the fate of the debate.