How Donald Trump revels in the new era of 'debatertainment'

Pow! Wham! Kerboom! The presidential debate this week was more like an episode of Batman than a dignified exchange of political views.

Bam! You’re a clown, Joe Biden told Donald Trump. Kerrrash! Your son took backhanders from Russia and he’s a coke fiend, Trump retorted. Consistently heckled by Trump, Biden bit back, telling him to shut up and stop yapping. The moderator, Fox News anchor Chris Wallace, could hardly get a word in edgeways, as Trump called Biden the stupidest kid in class at school, and Biden called the president racist.

Presidential debates under Trump have turned into a boxing match, a kind of circus-like live entertainment for the American people. They now tune in more for a Punch and Judy show than a serious examination of the two sides’ policies.

“Biden’s appalling social media reach is a tenth of Trump’s and, with a narrow poll lead, he would benefit from showing up Trump in the debates,” says James Fletcher, a British film director living in New York, who has just made a new film about Trump called The Accidental President. “Equally, a flub [or gaffe], as it’s known here, would haunt him all the way to the polls. Put simply, an election is a marketing competition and favours the candidate that can dominate the media and the oxygen of publicity.”

Though Trump was said to have lost this week’s debate, he knows exactly what he’s doing with his knockabout style. He is repeating his 2016 play book, when he first marginalised all his Republican primary opponents and then squashed Hillary Clinton, the Democratic candidate, through the same combination of heckling, abusive humour. This week, Biden had to fight Trump’s nickname for him, “sleepy Joe” – which is why he ramped up the energy and insults too.

Trump knows the way to defend himself is to fight fire with fire. When he was attacked by Clinton in 2016, he said she should be in jail. When he was accused of insulting women, he very quickly quipped “only Rosie O’Donnell”, a celebrity who had criticised him. He got big laughs.

What a change in tone and morals from the first presidential TV debate in 1960, between John F Kennedy and Richard Nixon.

Kennedy famously won on TV because Nixon sweated and appeared untrustworthy. What’s not so clearly remembered is that Nixon won on the radio. His Californian accent was preferred to Kennedy’s slightly awkward Boston Brahmin accent, still mocked today in The Simpsons.

Election debates have always been huge box office in America. The first Kennedy-Nixon head-to-head attracted more than 66 million viewers out of a population of 179 million – one of the most-watched broadcasts in US television history. The 1980 debates between president Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan drew 80 million viewers out of a population of 226 million.

Though viewing figures hit a low in 2000, in the debates between George W Bush and Al Gore, Barack Obama sent ratings back up, to more than 67 million in 2012.

But it’s Trump – who since 2004 has been honing his barrack-room lawyer TV skills on The Apprentice – who really moved the dial. More than 84 million people watched the first 2016 presidential debate between him and Clinton.

The debates can have a huge effect on the result. In 1976, Carter drew great support after president Gerald Ford foolishly said in their debate: “There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, and there never will be under a Ford administration.”

In 1984, Reagan scored a big hit against his younger Democrat opponent, Walter Mondale, when he declared: “I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent’s youth and inexperience.”

In 1992, president George HW Bush lost momentum by looking at his watch during his debate with Bill Clinton, coming across as impatient and worried in comparison with the cool, smooth master orator who would beat him. Over here, TV debates are a far less influential force in politics. If anything, Boris Johnson’s main adviser, Dominic Cummings, is happier not putting his boss up before the cameras at all. The negatives that come from a bad performance are thought to be more powerful than the possible positives from a good one.

“The difference between the Kennedy-Nixon debate and now is that citizens can share these successes and failures on an infinite social media loop,” says Fletcher, who has worked with David Cameron and Johnson.

“And this informs campaign managers’ terror of placing their charges in front of TV cameras. It explains Theresa May’s refusal to appear. It explains Boris Johnson’s refusal to be interviewed by Andrew Neil. One slip-up and irreparable damage is done as the offending clip goes viral.”

The only time that it’s thought debates really swung the British political dial was in 2010, when Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat leader, prevailed over Cameron and Gordon Brown – so much so that Brown said he “agreed with Nick” at several moments. Clegg won that leaders’ debate, the first on British TV, by a landslide, approved of by 51 per cent of those polled.

He talked straight to the camera and called questioners by their first name (“you won’t believe this, Jacqueline...”). It seems nothing short of hokey now, but at the time it worked a treat.

I was at that debate and saw an old friend and Cameron adviser about to leave it in a hurry. I asked him how he thought it went. He was so shocked and ashen-faced at Clegg’s success that he couldn’t speak.

Of course, you don’t know if the election result – the first hung parliament in 36 years – would have been the same without the debate. But, still, the 2010 election ended up with a Conservative-Lib Dem coalition, very probably built on that sudden outburst of Cleggmania.

In Britain, we respond less to TV debates and more to supposed gaffes on the campaign trail. We remember more Ed Miliband’s difficulties with consuming a bacon sandwich then we do his performance in the 2015 debate. Neil Kinnock is said to have blown his lead in the 1992 election over John Major when he came over all triumphalist at a Sheffield rally and bellowed like a superannuated teenager: “We’re all right.”

Perhaps because we are more negative than Americans, we remember failures more than successes, whether it’s Kinnock again, falling into the sea in Brighton in 1983, or Michael Foot wearing a shabby coat at the Cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday in 1981.

We are moved less by TV than slogans. The Saatchis’ “Labour isn’t working” poster in 1979 was a huge boost for Margaret Thatcher in that year’s election. And Cummings is said to have come up with the two most successful slogans of modern politics: “Let’s take back control” in the 2016 referendum, and “get Brexit done” in last year’s election.

Slogans can backfire too, of course. In the February 1974 election, Ted Heath asked the electorate: “Who governs Britain?” And voters swiftly answered: “Not you, mate!”

Harry Mount is the author of How England Made the English (Penguin)