The format of open-ended discussion and the detailed questions from Wallace set Trump on tilt early. He rambled, he became exasperated. There were moments of minor farce. Trump promised to speed the process of legal immigration “bigly.” Trump seemed to know nothing specific about the Supreme Court’s Heller decision, which allowed people in Washington, D.C., to possess firearms purchased after 1975 in their own homes. Clinton deliberately pretended the law had something to do with toddlers injuring themselves and murdering others with guns.

Trump showed the tiniest flashes of what made him formidable in the Republican primary, namely his ability to connect with the sense among his supporters that something has gone terribly wrong with the United States. “Our country is stagnant, we’ve lost our jobs, we’ve lost our business, we don’t make things anymore,” he said. And then he tried to tie Clinton to a status quo that so many Americans find dissatisfying. Surprisingly, he delivered the strongest piece of pro-life rhetoric ever uttered by a Republican candidate in a general election, denouncing late-term abortion in graphic and morally charged terms. That was actually surprising considering how he had defended the practice in the past.