Fox News? The four horsemen of the Republican apocalypse? The FBI? Whatever the outcome, historians will judge harshly those who did not stop Trump when they could

The US election might not end tomorrow. Anyone who lived through the photo-finish of 2000, when it took until mid-December for a winner to be declared – and only then by a ruling of the supreme court – will know that a presidential contest does not always produce a president, at least not right away. But one thing will certainly be over – and that is the dizzying, sometimes nauseating, 18-month-long saga that has been the 2016 campaign.

It is standard to describe a US presidential contest as bitter and divisive. In 2012, the Guardian’s front-page story branded the battle of Barack Obama v Mitt Romney “one of the most closely fought and polarised in recent history”. Looking back, that race looks like a veritable philosophy seminar, exemplary in its civility and decorum, compared with this one.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest America’s search for Obama’s successor has been a horror show of lies, bullying and the bigotry. Photograph: Robyn Beck/AFP/Getty Images

In a crowded field, the 2016 campaign stands out as unusually awful. Yes, it has been riveting, whether followed from a distance or covered up close. Those who say it has unfolded like a Netflix drama in real time are not exaggerating. Except no drama would have dared offer this cast of characters – a real-estate tycoon with a crush on a Russian dictator, an ex-congressman investigated for sexting an underage girl, a former Miss Universe humiliated as “Miss Piggy” – or the last-minute reversals of fortune. Campaign 2016 has made House of Cards look tame.

But that cannot conceal the truth: the US’s search for Obama’s successor has been a horror show, revealing – and dredging up – a stew of racism, misogyny and casual violence bubbling below the surface of American life. Eight in 10 US voters say the campaign has left them feeling disgusted, according to a CBS/New York Times poll last week. Not dissatisfied. Disgusted. The platonic ideal of an election is a sober discussion of the questions that will confront the US over the next decade. The reality has been a marathon of insult, threat and lies.

If elected, Donald Trump poses the greatest threat to all our futures | Letters Read more

The blame for this belongs to one man. Donald Trump has fought a presidential campaign like no other. He has mocked opponents for their looks, belittled women, disparaged war heroes, damned ethnic and other minorities in crude, bigoted language, jeered at disabled people, beaten his chest with bellicose promises of state-sponsored violence that would trample on the US constitution and trigger a third world war, and told dozens and dozens of lies every day. While his opponent has offered detailed and substantive policy prescriptions, those have barely got a mention: Trump’s knack for hogging media attention, usually by saying or tweeting something jaw-droppingly outrageous, has left no room. In the four-and-a-half hours of formal presidential debates between Trump and Hillary Clinton, climate change was discussed for not one minute.

But Trump does not bear the blame alone. Also shamed by the 2016 campaign are those institutions and individuals who failed to stand up to him. Some understood the danger he represented, seeing in him a would-be dictator – “I alone can fix this!” – whose contempt for basic democratic norms, from the importance of a free press to the need to respect the outcome of a democratic election, suggested a lurch towards fascism. That small handful will be remembered with admiration. But, whatever the outcome today, historians of the American republic will judge harshly those who did not stop Trump when they could. It will damn those who indulged, pampered and enabled him to reach this moment: where polls still show him with a path, albeit narrow, to the White House.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Jeb Bush was among the Republican rivals who had no idea how to deal with Trump. Photograph: Spencer Platt/Getty Images

First in this roll-call of shame is the Republican party. Among those hanging their heads should be the 16 rival candidates who allowed themselves to be steamrollered by a reality TV host and serially bankrupted businessman. Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz and the others had no idea how to deal with Trump. They collectively made a strategic error by failing to realise their primary task was to take him out. Instead, they fought each other, each hoping to emerge as the sole, anti-Trump candidate around whom Republicans would unite. That proved a delusion.

As Trump’s poll lead increased in late 2015 and early 2016, his rivals grew ever more frightened of taking a shot at him, anxious that they might alienate his supporters or, worse, that he might train his fire back on them. So while, say, Chris Christie mocked Rubio on a TV debate stage in New Hampshire in February, Trump could literally step back and watch – only to emerge as the winner in that state’s Republican primary a few days later.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Trump rival and New Jersey governor Chris Christie. Photograph: Mel Evans/AP

Perhaps the Republicans cannot be blamed for the weakness of the field that fought Trump for their party’s nomination. Perhaps no traditional politician – no senator or governor – could take on Trump when the Republican grassroots, so furious at the political establishment, were hungering for an outsider. (Although, of course, this anti-establishment fervour, this loathing of all things Washington, was itself stoked for years by Republicans and their allies on Fox News and in the rest of the conservative political-media-entertainment complex. In losing their party to Trump, the Republicans were burned by a fire they themselves had started.)

But what shames them is their conduct afterwards. Even as Trump made clear what kind of man he is – calling Mexicans “rapists”, suggesting African-Americans are too lazy to work, that Jews see everything through the lens of money, calling women “dogs” and “pigs”, threatening violence against protesters, endorsing torture and the murder of the families of suspected terrorists, calling for a foreign power (Russia) to hack into emails belonging to his political rival, arguing that women who have abortions should “face some sort of punishment”, and being exposed as a proud perpetrator of sexual assault, a man whose approach to women is to “grab them by the pussy” – even after all this and so much more, most senior Republicans of note stood by him.

To be sure, they condemned him occasionally, when the extremity of their standard bearer’s behaviour left them no alternative. Paul Ryan, who serves as speaker of the House of Representatives, rightly called it the “textbook definition of a racist comment” when Trump said that Judge Gonzalo Curiel could not be impartial in handling the lawsuit against the so-called Trump University because Curiel was “Mexican”. In fact, the judge was a US citizen, born in Indiana. Ryan cold-shouldered Trump again, after the release of the Access Hollywood tape in which Trump boasted of his attacks on women. But he never repudiated him fully. Ryan never said Trump was unfit to be president of the United States and that he would not vote for him.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Senator John McCain initially endorsed Trump. Photograph: J. Scott Applewhite/AP

The same was nearly true of Senator John McCain, tortured for five and a half years in a Hanoi cell and yet derided as “not a hero” by Trump (who said he preferred those who were not captured). McCain swallowed that, along with Trump’s promise to ban Muslims and to deport 11 million undocumented migrants – only withdrawing his endorsement last month, after the notorious tape.

Until then, McCain, like most of his fellow Republicans, clung to the fiction that Trump would transform himself into a new creature: sober, presidential and, above all, capable of being tamed by the Republican establishment – even though there was not a shred of evidence, bar a very occasional willingness on the candidate’s part to read prepared lines from a teleprompter, to support that fantasy.

That puts them on a moral plane only slightly above that occupied by Trump’s trio of enablers: Rudy Giuliani, Chris Christie and Newt Gingrich. Those three horsemen of the Republican apocalypse conspired in the lie that a snake-oil salesman was fit to be president – and destroyed what remained of their reputations in the process. As Hillary Clinton pointed out, Giuliani used to prosecute tax-dodgers. In this campaign, he praised Trump’s failure to pay income tax for at least two decades as evidence of his “genius”.

And that is to omit the fourth horseman: Mike Pence, the defender of family values who has served as the running mate of a thrice-married, serially adulterous, self-confessed grabber of women. When the 2005 “grab them” tape emerged, Pence went into seclusion. Some thought he might emerge to announce he was quitting the Republican ticket. He did no such thing. Instead, he examined his conscience, found it pristine and continued to act as a character witness to a man who cheats his taxes, cheats on his wives and lies every time he opens his mouth.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Donald Trump and Mike Pence campaign together In Wisconsin. Photograph: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

It’s easy to attack the spineless “leaders” of the Republican party. Easy but incomplete. It’s a rule of political combat that no one ever, ever, attacks the voters – a rule Clinton unwisely broke when she deployed an odd metaphor to describe half of Trump’s supporters as a “basket of deplorables”. But that rule only applies to candidates for office. Any truthful assessment of a campaign has at least to include those doing the voting.

Some blame surely attaches to the Americans who let Trump keep up the bullying and the bigotry and voted for him anyway. There is no escaping the fact that north of 40% of the US electorate have been prepared to vote for Trump despite everything that he has said and done. One poll found 22% of Trump’s own supporters believed he would start a nuclear war. They thought that, but were prepared to vote for him anyway. None of them will be able to say: “We didn’t know.”

Notable among that group are Christian evangelical voters, people who used to say that character mattered, that the personal conduct of a candidate was crucial. Five years ago, only 30% of white evangelicals believed that a person guilty of “immoral” personal behaviour could behave ethically in a public role. Now that figure stands at 72%, a remarkably rapid shift. It means people of supposedly deep moral convictions have been prepared to junk those beliefs just to accommodate Trump.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Christian vote: a Republican presidential rally in Mobile Alabama. Photograph: Julie Dermansky/Corbis via Getty Images

Still, they will have had their reasons – including, for many millions, an all-consuming loathing of Hillary Clinton, a hatred so deep it blocks out, or at least outweighs, Trump’s copious flaws. Analysts have not been sure how to explain the other motives. Some have been compassionate and highlighted the role of economic disadvantage among Trump supporters, those left behind by globalisation. Others have suggested that Trumpism is a howl of often racist, misogynistic rage from angry white men, furious that their once-privileged place in American life has been supplanted. The latter camp has taken to sharing pictures or reports of overt racism and sexism by Trump supporters with the sarcastic caption: “economic anxiety”.

This debate has been thoroughly aired in parts of the American press, but, overall, the media – and especially TV – shares some responsibility for the dire state of the 2016 campaign. It’s true that the most respectable newspapers and reporters kept tabs on Trump’s prodigious lying: one correspondent tweeted out a daily tally, often stretching into the dozens. Others maintained diligent fact-checking services.

But the big picture was indulgence on an epic scale. For months, Trump had unique and unprecedented access to the airwaves of cable TV. Rather than wait to be booked for a set-piece interview, he would simply call up Fox or MSNBC and put himself on the air. He knew he was ratings gold; he knew the networks would not be able to say no. He had a similarly instinctive, reptilian understanding of the media’s addiction to outrage: his nocturnal tweeting habit spread offence and insult far and wide – but it ensured he remained at the centre of public attention for over a year. According to the media analyst Jack Shafer, the only subject ever to have enjoyed a comparable full-spectrum dominance is 9/11.

Yet that quantitative imbalance was not the only distortion. The media clung to its notion that balance required equivalence, so that if Trump wallowed in dishonesty, requiring constant fact-checking, then Clinton had to be treated as equally dishonest. Witness the morning TV anchor Matt Lauer, widely pilloried for a programme in which he let Trump say anything, much of it false, but played inquisitor-general with Clinton, especially over her emails. (Still, the enduring face of media indulgence of Trump will be that of late-night TV host Jimmy Fallon, playfully ruffling the hair of the real estate magnate – treating him as just another lovable rogue.)

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The moment when TV host Jimmy Fallon ruffled Trump’s hair epitomised the media’s indulgence of him.

Nowhere was this mindset more misleading than in the never-ending discussion of those emails, especially in the campaign’s final stretch. Which brings us to the role of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and, in particular, its director, James Comey. His decision to announce 10 days before election day that he was, in effect, reopening the FBI probe into the email affair handed the last week of the campaign to Trump. It put Clinton on the defensive, halted her momentum and stopped the bleeding in Team Trump. Many analysts believe that, by bringing Republican voters back home to the party, it will also prevent Democrats retaking the senate.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest FBI director James Comey takes his place in the hall of shame. Photograph: Carolyn Kaster/AP

And all that on what turned out to be an entirely false premise. On Sunday, Comey had to admit that the cache of supposedly new emails was, in fact, nothing of the sort and that there were no grounds to alter his July view that Clinton should face no further action. But by then the damage had been done. Whether through partisan bias or sheer incompetence, we do not yet fully know.

So Comey takes his place in the hall of shame of the 2016 campaign, shuffling into the group photo alongside Julian Assange, who might as well have handed over his WikiLeaks operation to the Trump campaign. Assange kept up a drip feed of leaked emails from the Clinton team, many of them embarrassing, none devastating – while conspicuously leaking nothing that might damage the Republican nominee. WikiLeaks never produced Trump’s tax returns or the outtakes from The Apprentice said to contain yet more evidence that Trump is a bigot and sexual predator. It targeted Clinton alone.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks operation kept up a drip feed of leaked emails from the Clinton team, while leaking nothing that might damage Trump. Photograph: Ken McKay/ITV/Rex/Shutterstock

And there should be room in that photo for Vladimir Putin, whose intelligence agencies are near-universally believed to be behind the wholesale hacking of the Democratic party, and whose goal appears to have been either the installation of Trump or, failing that, the sowing of confusion and chaos in the US electoral system. (Some believe Putin is saving his greatest attack till last, fearing he will hack the electronic voting system used in several key US states, thereby casting doubt on the validity of the result.)

The New York Times deserves great praise for keeping the spotlight on Trump by exposing his non-payment of tax

And who would stand on the other side? Who should win a medal for their service in this bloody campaign? Michelle Obama will be remembered for giving two of the best speeches of recent times, one at the Democratic convention, the other lambasting Trump for his misogyny. The old media behemoths of the New York Times and Washington Post deserve great praise for keeping the spotlight on Trump, the former by exposing his non-payment of tax, the latter for the work of David Fahrenthold, who got the scoop on the “grab them” tape and who kept digging at Trump’s exaggerated claims of charitable giving. The comedians of Saturday Night Live deserve a mention, too, especially for Alec Baldwin’s performance, which captured the bullying, meandering emptiness of Trump. Daily Show alumni John Oliver and Samantha Bee also did their bit and did it well.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Daily Show’s Samantha Bee. Photograph: YouTube

Those who can hold their heads highest, however, are the conservatives who put country before party. The Bush family could have gone further – by, say, officially backing Clinton – but their refusal to endorse Trump does something to redeem the clan’s reputation. Newspapers such as the Arizona Republic or the Dallas Morning News broke with their pasts, and their readers, to endorse a Democrat rather than back someone they saw as unfit. The backlash was severe: staff at the Arizona paper received death threats. Individuals including senators Jeff Flake and Ben Sasse and former Bush speechwriter David Frum made a similar choice.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Michelle Obama’s powerful rebuke against Trump and his treatment of women.

They all understood what their fellow Republicans did not. That Trump was not just this year’s party standard-bearer, to be shown due loyalty. That he was, instead, a menace to the republic, someone ready to violate the norms that underpin democracy – and that nearly half the country was ready to vote for him. This campaign is almost over. But the dangers it has revealed will not disappear.