Leaving Las Vegas was maturity, civility

For a remarkable 30 minutes tonight, presidential debate moderator Chris Wallace tried – "bigly," in Donald Trump debate-speak – and nearly succeeded in keeping the GOP's Trump and Democrat Hillary Clinton focused on actual important issues.

But much like the two debates before it, this final showdown in Las Vegas was always a third-grade playground brawl waiting to break out.

Somehow a question about immigration policy pivoted to a back-and-forth about Russian leader Vladimir Putin and his role in trying to influence the U.S. election. Clinton said Russian hackers were behind leaks of emails by Clinton's aides and that Trump would essentially be "a puppet" for the Russian strongman if elected.

"You're the puppet!" erupted Trump, who until then had looked bored at times in discussing the Supreme Court, gun policy and women's reproductive rights at the behest of Fox News' Wallace. But then before the debate even started, neither candidate even made a pretense of trying to shake the other's hand – a powerful symbol of how civility became an afterthought in 2016.

The childish and awkward exchanges seemed a microcosm of the only reason that Wednesday night's faceoff at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas was widely anticipated, even cheered, by the American people. It was applauded as the signal that the strangest, the ugliest, and arguably the worst presidential campaign in modern U.S. political history is finally almost over.

From here on out, the race becomes a 20-day sprint to the finish line – more about rallying the troops and amping up get-out-the-vote operations for Election Day than converting the handful of remaining undecided voters. Indeed, in recent days it already felt like Trump had stopped running for the Oval Office and was instead working to become permanent king of the angry and conspiratorial extreme far right.

If The Donald had any remaining ambitions to woo moderate voters or somehow connect with women who've been abandoning his campaign in droves amid allegations that his outrageous 2005 comments about sexual assault were not just talk, those plans stayed 1,000 miles away from Vegas.

Instead, Trump defended his tough stance on undocumented immigration — including his plan for a $10 billion-plus border wall — with crude language that echoed his opening 2015 salvo about Mexico sending "rapists" across the border, saying that some migrants are "bad hombres."  Later he shocked some observers by refusing to promise he would abide by the results on Election Night. "I will look at it at the time," he said.

Clinton, for her part, had spent a remarkable five days preparing for tonight's showdown. You have to wonder if her preparation has been watching tapes of Muhammad Ali's legendary 1974 victory over George Foreman in Zaire. Like Ali, Clinton has spent much of the debates using the "rope-a-dope" technique, absorbing Trump's blows and watching the Manhattan alleged billionaire punch himself – and the electorate, into exhaustion.

The former secretary of state doubled down on portraying herself as someone who wants to be a unifier in the White House. She said she regretted the bitter opposition of the National Rifle Association to her candidacy, saying "what I would like to do is bring these people together" to find common ground on gun safety issues.

But Clinton also pivoted and deflected when Trump tried to press her on issues related to the emails – published by the website Wikileaks but possibly hacked, according to Obama administration officials, by Russians – or a new tape by right-wing provocateur James O'Keefe suggesting a campaign aide encouraged unrest and possibly violence at Trump rallies.

If nothing else, the duel in the Nevada desert dramatized the dumbing-down of the presidential debates that have shocked TV viewers with crude talk, bizarre sideshows such as the back-and-forth over Trump's treatment of a Venezuelan beauty-pageant contestant, and over-the-top comments like Trump claiming that Clinton "has tremendous hate in her heart." The ugliness feels a million miles from the founding of the debates in 1960 – sober if slightly boring affairs in which Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy expressed their respect for each other's views.

Yesterday, both Trump and Clinton treated the debates like it was the much-derided White House Correspondents Association dinner (also known as "the nerdprom") by each showing up with an army of B-list celebrities. Trump's strange entourage included the likes of Sarah Palin and Malik Obama, the renegade half-brother of the sitting president; Clinton's choices included billionaires Mark Cuban and Meg Whitman, which certainly didn't dispel the criticism that the Democratic nominee is a little too close to the moneyed classes.

There was, arguably, a sad irony in the Clinton-Trump campaign reaching its climax in Las Vegas. For the Democrats, the race essentially started there on a hot October night almost exactly one year ago, when upstart Sen. Bernie Sanders debated Clinton (and three long-forgotten rivals) at The Wynn hotel for the first primary debate. There was still hope then that the 2016 election could bring real, radical change, on that neon-let evening when Sanders said "I believe in a society where all people do well … not just a handful of billionaires." There was also a touch of class when the Vermont senator declared that he didn't care about Clinton's "damned emails."

That moment of political grace feels like 100 years ago. Hope melted into something else – a choice between the pied piper of the terminally angry and the brave defender of the comfortable status quo – long before this strange and twisted American trip passed Barstow on the edge of the desert, en route to last night's dénouement.

Finally, it's all over but the shouting.

Unfortunately, there's going to be a lot of shouting.