"You can take your desert/Goddammit, gimme mine/'Cause I got Las Vegas on my mind."

—Randy Newman, "Happy Ending," Faust.

LAS VEGAS, NEVADA—On the night before the last encounter between Donald Trump and Hillary Rodham Clinton, CNN's Don Lemon was finally reduced to incoherence by the demolition derby of the English language conducted by the various surrogates employed by the Trump campaign. I think it was Scottie Nell Hughes—Read about her here!—and I think she was talking about the latest woman who had come forth to charge that the sausage-like appendages of the Republican nominee had found their way to places on her person where they should not have found their way. After a couple of minutes of listening to bits of the language flying in all directions like chrome off a Buick, this is what Lemon said.

"Hummina-hummina," Don Lemon said. "Goo-goo-goo-joob."

I am not the Walrus. Ralph Kramden is.

I felt his pain. Truly, I did.

The last encounter between the two principals once again was a failed exercise in political interspecies communication. Both communicated in English, such as it was, but Hillary Rodham Clinton spoke English as though she had learned it shortly after her birth, while Trump spoke it as if he were one of those chimpanzees to whom people tried to teach sign language.

TRUMP: And once the border is secured, at a later date, we'll make a determination as to the rest. But we have some bad hombres here, and we're going to get them out.

In fairness, "bad hombres" is the most Romneyesque formulation ever employed by El Caudillo del Mar-A-Lago in that it is distastefully clumsy, clumsily distasteful, and utterly memorable. However, the night's main takeaway is going to be the salad fork that Trump stuck into his campaign's eye when he said he would wait and see whether or not he would accept the results of the election.

WALLACE: Mr. Trump, I want to ask you about one last question in this topic. You have been warning at rallies recently that this election is rigged and that Hillary Clinton is in the process of trying to steal it from you…I want to ask you here on the stage tonight: Do you make the same commitment that you will absolutely—sir, that you will absolutely accept the result of this election?

Open your eye. It will all be over in a moment…

TRUMP: I will look at it at the time. I'm not looking at anything now. I'll look at it at the time. What I've seen—what I've seen is so bad. First of all, the media is so dishonest and so corrupt, and the pile-on is so amazing. The New York Times actually wrote an article about it, but they don't even care. It's so dishonest. And they've poisoned the mind of the voters. But unfortunately for them, I think the voters are seeing through it. I think they're going to see through it. We'll find out on November 8th. But I think they're going to see through it.

Wait, I think there's a squosh more room there behind the retina…

WALLACE: But, sir, there is a tradition in this country—in fact, one of the prides of this country—is the peaceful transition of power and that no matter how hard-fought a campaign is, that at the end of the campaign that the loser concedes to the winner. Not saying that you're necessarily going to be the loser or the winner, but that the loser concedes to the winner and that the country comes together in part for the good of the country. Are you saying you're not prepared now to commit to that principle?

TRUMP: What I'm saying is that I will tell you at the time. I'll keep you in suspense. OK?

Mmmmm, aqueous fluid. Deee-lish!

CLINTON: Well, Chris, let me respond to that, because that's horrifying.

And thus did the third debate of the presidential campaign end, in all the ways that mattered. Up until then, it was plain that the debate would change no minds, largely because I refuse to believe there are any minds out there to change. If you can have immersed yourself in the unprecedented weirdness of his wretched campaign, and you still think Donald Trump should be president, you will defend that choice even if someone sticks an Uzi in your ear. The fact that Trump will keep us in suspense on Election Night as to whether he'll accept defeat, even if he winds up losing 40 states, is not going to bother you at all.

And how anyone can be "undecided" at this point is a mystery I never will solve.

AFP Getty Images

The debate began with a remarkable run of substance. Moderator Chris Wallace, who started strong, lagged in the middle, and collapsed entirely in the late going, opened with questions about who the respective candidates would appoint to the Supreme Court. This touched off a decent discussion about gun control, and the most substantive discussion of a woman's right to choose that we have heard in this entire campaign.

Trump was foggy on the specifics—if he knows what the Supreme Court's Heller gun-control decision actually is, I'll eat the 14th green at Turnberry—but he was at least coherent and resolute in his position. On abortion, it's clear he's gone all in with the anti-choice crowd, talking again and again about ripping babies from the womb and pivoting (as they all do) to the argument that the law in this area should devolve back to the states. (A very bad idea, but an idea nonetheless.) Meanwhile, HRC gave the clearest and most definitive statement of support for the rights codified in Roe v. Wade that I've ever heard. No more "safe, legal, and rare" dodge, HRC spoke forthrightly about the efforts out in the states to curb those rights piecemeal.

CLINTON: Well, I strongly support Roe v. Wade, which guarantees a constitutional right to a woman to make the most intimate, most difficult, in many cases, decisions about her health care that one can imagine. And in this case, it's not only about Roe v. Wade. It is about what's happening right now in America. So many states are putting very stringent regulations on women that block them from exercising that choice to the extent that they are defunding Planned Parenthood, which, of course, provides all kinds of cancer screenings and other benefits for women in our country. Donald has said he's in favor of defunding Planned Parenthood. He even supported shutting the government down to defund Planned Parenthood. I will defend Planned Parenthood. I will defend Roe v. Wade, and I will defend women's rights to make their own health care decisions.

And when Wallace brought up "partial-birth" abortion, a term of art invented by the anti-choice forces and sadly adopted as medical jargon by too many journalists, HRC didn't flinch.

WALLACE: I'm going to give you a chance to respond, but I want to ask you, Secretary Clinton, I want to explore how far you believe the right to abortion goes. You have been quoted as saying that the fetus has no constitutional rights. You also voted against a ban on late-term, partial-birth abortions. Why?

CLINTON: Because Roe v. Wade very clearly sets out that there can be regulations on abortion so long as the life and the health of the mother are taken into account. And when I voted as a senator, I did not think that that was the case. The kinds of cases that fall at the end of pregnancy are often the most heartbreaking, painful decisions for families to make. I have met with women who toward the end of their pregnancy get the worst news one could get, that their health is in jeopardy if they continue to carry to term or that something terrible has happened or just been discovered about the pregnancy. I do not think the United States government should be stepping in and making those most personal of decisions.

It couldn't last, of course. And it didn't. Not long after they wrapped up their discussion about the Supreme Court, which was the only facsimile of a real political debate occurring in any of the three debates, Trump went back to dropping, "no" and "wrong" Baldwinnishly into the conversation.

When a discussion of immigration suddenly morphed into a discussion of the WikiLeaks revelations, at Trump's insistence, Clinton then wrenched it into a discussion of whether or not Vladimir Putin is playing shenanigans with the 2016 election. (Wallace was utterly lost at this point. Frankly, so was I.) Trump stubbornly refused to condemn such tampering and then the whole cafeteria exploded into a barrage of flying snickerdoodles.

TRUMP: Now we can talk about Putin. I don't know Putin. He said nice things about me. If we got along well, that would be good. If Russia and the United States got along well and went after ISIS, that would be good. He has no respect for her. He has no respect for our president. And I'll tell you what: We're in very serious trouble, because we have a country with tremendous numbers of nuclear warheads -- 1,800, by the way -- where they expanded and we didn't, 1,800 nuclear warheads. And she's playing chicken. Look, Putin...

WALLACE: Wait, but...

TRUMP: ... from everything I see, has no respect for this person.

CLINTON: Well, that's because he'd rather have a puppet as president of the United States.

TRUMP: No puppet. No puppet.

(Here is where we mention that, in a masterstroke of counterprogramming, Turner Classic Movies put up a triple-feature of Fail Safe, Advise and Consent, and Seven Days In May. Curiously, Wallace declined to ask the candidates their respective positions on the decision to nuke New York to atone for the accidental nuking of Moscow, the nomination of Bob Leffingwell to be Secretary of State, and the disarmament treaty that President Jordan Lyman negotiated with the Soviets. However, Fail Safe was running while the "No puppet, no puppet" dialogue was being conducted here. This was somewhat uncomfortable.)

At this point, Trump reverted, and we were back with two people talking two different variations of English to two very different audiences. He repeatedly called HRC a liar, pushing it at one point to say that she shouldn't even been running for president, and wrapping things up towards the end with this colloquy that was a perfect fractal of the whole campaign.

Wallace had decided to waste the last section of the debate with a discussion of The Debt, in clear violation of The Blog's First Law Of Economics—Fck the deficit. People got no jobs. People got no money.—and using some material from the Center for a Responsible Federal Budget, Pete Peterson's bamboozlement factory, to do so. (This dropped Wallace's score from an A-minus to a B-minus.) The two tangled a little bit on "entitlements"—God, Wallace, you're flirting with a C there—and Trump decided it was time to go for the jugular, which he apparently believes is located in HRC's ankle.

CLINTON: Well, Chris, I am on record as saying that we need to put more money into the Social Security Trust Fund. That's part of my commitment to raise taxes on the wealthy. My Social Security payroll contribution will go up, as will Donald's, assuming he can't figure out how to get out of it. But what we want to do is to replenish the Social Security Trust Fund...

TRUMP: Such a nasty woman.

And there you have it. This campaign, summed up in two sentences. Trump was speaking in the English of talk radio, of the conservative media bubble that has surrounded him, and of the chain e-mail. It was drunk-uncle English, so convinced of its own righteousness that it's blind to its own cartwheeling ignorance. Hillary Rodham Clinton was speaking the English of the career politician, albeit with a bit more of an edge than she usually brings to it.

(You will notice the neat little elbow she tossed in that last exchange that prompted Trump's snappy rejoinder.)

Put them both on stage together, and what you get is cacophony, whether they're talking over each other or not. They are not equally committed to democratic institutions or democratic dialogue, so what you get is an election propelled by gibberish, English as a foreign tongue, and the sad realization that so much of what we thought of ourselves as a people really was a mistake in translation.

"Boyaaaasamababa/I'm speakin' in tongues!"

—Randy Newman, "Happy Ending," Faust. (Partial Approximation.)

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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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