New York Notebook | 29 September 2016

The first presidential debate was a disappointment. Half an hour into the big Trump-Clinton show on Long Island, many among the audience must have asked themselves why they weren’t watching The Real Housewives of Orange County instead. The strangest exchange concerned how to defeat Isis. Donald Trump said, ‘They’re beating us at our own game with the internet’ and Hillary Clinton agreed that winning requires ‘going after them online’. Hillary won by speaking in complete sentences, albeit brimming with bromides, while Trump lapsed into incoherence, apparently advised to sound calmer and more presidential. But Trump without his insults — of Mexicans, women and Muslims — just isn’t as much fun. He appeared as unhinged and juvenile as usual, but less entertaining.

Trump’s flat performance has come as a relief to most New Yorkers, who have been working themselves into an election panic in recent days. I sensed the first hint of real Trump fear at the New Republic’s relaunch party on Union Square West. The New York liberals I know had until then seemed pretty certain that the unthinkable couldn’t happen: the Donald is simply too self-destructive, too crazy to win. But the gathering in the New Republic’s well-appointed offices came two days after Hillary’s great stumble — the literal stumble, before she was whisked away from a 9/11 memorial, and the tactical stumble when, two hours later, she emerged from her daughter’s Manhattan apartment and declared, ‘I’m feeling great’, even though she was suffering from pneumonia. I greeted the veteran First Amendment lawyer and Democratic political operative Victor Kovner. Kovner is a principled man, but he understands the realities of party politics, and he’s all in for Clinton. Skipping the small talk, he told me: ‘My friends overseas keep asking me, is this the end of American civilisation?’ ‘Tell your friends not to worry,’ I replied.