At the second Presidential debate between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, all of Trump’s strategy revolved around positioning himself as the man, the alpha. Photograph by Rick Wilking / Reuters

A surreal, sickening loop of the news cycle opened last Friday and then closed last night, at the Presidential debate, when Anderson Cooper called Donald Trump to account for the hot-mic audio from 2005 that was threatening to destroy his campaign once and for all. Speaking to the host of “Access Hollywood,” Trump had bragged, with a disturbing combination of nonchalance and neediness, that he simply couldn’t resist forcing himself on beautiful women. “I just start kissing them,” he said, proceeding to detail a mode of physical instigation most commonly found in porn about stranded teen-agers, in court testimony in sexual-assault cases, and in bars that women never go to twice. “Just kiss—I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star they let you do it. You can do anything.” The host, Billy Bush, giggling with sweaty enthusiasm, echoed him: “Whatever you want.” Then Trump, the current Republican nominee for President, elaborated. “Grab them by the pussy,” he said. “You can do anything.”

“You bragged that you have sexually assaulted women. Do you understand that?” Cooper asked Trump last night. “No, I didn’t say that at all,” Trump responded. He stuck to the half-answer he’d put forth over the weekend—he regretted the comments, but they were “locker-room talk”—and then swerved, as he did many times last night, to ISIS, which was “chopping off heads . . . and, frankly, drowning people in steel cages.” (Of course, the systematic sexual violation of women is also a central part of ISIS strategy.) Cooper asked Trump to clarify: Had he actually kissed or groped women without their consent, or had he not? Trump answered, “Nobody has more respect for women than I do.” Cooper asked him again. Trump said, “I have tremendous respect for women.” Cooper asked him a third time if he’d ever “done those things,” and Trump said, “Women have respect for me. And I will tell you, no, I have not.”

This Presidential race has repeatedly devolved into gender-centered theatre, and when Trump and Hillary Clinton are onstage together it can seem like a nightmarish version of a medieval morality play: Woman, Experience, and Discretion stand on one side of the stage, while the Bad Angel stands on the other, heckling Woman and tweeting, “Check out sex tape.” Last night, all of Trump’s strategy revolved around positioning himself as the man, the alpha—in the words of Nigel Farage, the “silverback gorilla” who could “dominate” his opponent. He stalked around the stage and stood directly behind Clinton as she answered audience questions; he breathed heavily, he shouted, he interrupted, he lied, he called Clinton the “devil,” he gleefully explained his plans to jail her if he is elected, and he said, over and over, that she should be ashamed of herself. And yet the worst of Trump’s many familiar male-specific debate tactics may have been when he said, so confidently, that “nobody” has more respect for women than him—that, to put it another way, women aren’t going to get more respect from anybody else.

It’s been obvious for a long time, of course, that Trump has essentially no respect for women whatsoever. In a divorce deposition detailed in the 1993 book “Lost Tycoon: The Many Lives of Donald J. Trump,” Ivana Trump alleges that her husband violently assaulted her: angry about a botched scalp-reduction surgery, Trump ripped Ivana’s hair out, tore her clothes off, and raped her, she said. (She later explained, in a formal statement, “I referred to this as a ‘rape,’ but I do not want my words to be interpreted in a literal or criminal sense.”) Trump has repeatedly spoken about his daughter Ivanka in a sexual manner, and, on “The Howard Stern Show,” he nonchalantly admitted to being attracted to Paris Hilton when she was twelve. Among many other damning professional incidents, Trump once called a lawyer “disgusting” because she needed to pump breast milk, and then defended himself for doing so; he reportedly wanted to fire female employees at his California golf club whom he deemed unattractive. In the four days since the “Access Hollywood” tape was released, more graphic and vulgar audio has surfaced from Trump’s "Howard Stern" appearances, as have details from a variety of lawsuits accusing the Trump Organization of systematically mistreating women.

And this is part of the reason it’s so excruciating to watch Trump debate Clinton: as a candidate, he is unprepared for the historical particulars of this election in every way—save for his vast reserve of natural sexism. Trump is perfectly and uniquely equipped to tap every last ounce of normalized gender discrimination in this country and throw it at our first female major-party Presidential nominee. He’s not even really doing it consciously, I don’t think: he lacks political training and, apparently, a conscience, and he is not, it seems, in sufficient control of himself to act otherwise. Trump tried to overpower Clinton onstage in the same manner that he dismisses every woman who’s not attractive and subservient to him—as simply the natural and best way of doing things, a matter of course.

Trump also once again modelled, at the debate, the one way he has picked up on to get women to accept his sexism: to tell them that he’s no different from any other guy out there, and then to suggest that, all things considered, he’s the best they’re going to get. There’s a kernel of truth to this, if we limit our inquiry to the G.O.P. only: at The Cut, Rebecca Traister detailed some of the anti-woman legislation supported by Paul Ryan, Jason Chaffetz, and Mike Pence—all of whom denounced the Trump tape over the weekend. “Which is worse: Threatening to grab someone by the pussy or forcing someone to carry and give birth to a baby that is the result of rape?” she wrote. “Popping a Tic Tac in preparation for forced extramarital kissing with a stranger or actively discouraging women’s full participation in the workforce?”

We might understand how women come to feel that there are no good options available to them: that sexism is as fixed as gravity, and so working with it, never against it, is the only thing we can do. Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s campaign manager, told Ryan Lizza that being a female consultant in the Republican Party means “when I walk into a meeting at the R.N.C. or somewhere I always feel like I’m walking into a bachelor party in the locker room of the Elks club.” She alluded to being harassed by congressmen, calling it an “occupational hazard.” She elaborated on this after the debate last night, in an interview with Chris Matthews, on MSNBC. When she was “younger and prettier,” Conway said, she saw some of the conservative politicians who are now trying to distance themselves from Trump “rubbing up against girls, sticking their tongue down women’s throats . . . uninvited.”

And still, we are witnessing, parallel with Trump’s anti-woman assault—and likely exacerbating it—the ascendance of a woman to a height we’ve never seen in American politics before. There are so many people who have become invested in the idea of sexism persisting into eternity; in less than a month, we’ll be able to count exactly how many people tried to make the opposite come true.

More on the debate: John Cassidy on the unprecedented nastiness of Donald Trump, Amy Davidson on Trump’s dictatorial display, and Benjamin Wallace-Wells on Hillary Clinton’s coming struggle with Trump supporters.