ANALYSIS: Trump Rides Alone as Spectacle Slows Campaign Tailspin

Within minutes of Sunday night’s debate, Donald Trump turned the biggest moment of the presidential campaign into what his bid for the White House has always been at its core: a wild, unruly, anger-fueled spectacle.

The main message Trump drove at the second presidential debate in St. Louis was of visceral hatred of the Clintons and what they’ve come to represent. With women who feel wronged by the Clintons just footsteps away, he unloaded on Bill Clinton as “abusive to women,” accused Hillary Clinton of laughing off the pain of a rape victim, and said flatly that his opponent would be jailed if he were president.

Those efforts, vicious and downright ugly as they were, may be enough to calm the Trump base by reminding core Republicans of the choice that’s now less than 30 days away. When the debate turned to policy and honesty, he hammered Clinton as representing an old way of thinking – and worse.

“She lied. Now she is blaming the lie on the late great Abraham Lincoln,” Trump said in one of his more effective exchanges. “That’s one that I haven’t heard. Honest Abe never lied.”

But this was Trump riding alone. After days where erstwhile allies bolted, amid pleas with him to fully apologize for his vile and vulgar comments about women, Trump’s answer was to attack.

It should no longer come as a surprise that that’s where Trump’s instincts take him. It’s also hard to see this strategy adding to his campaign’s appeal at this late stage.

As for those still with him, Trump broke publicly with his still-loyal running mate, Mike Pence, over how to handle the humanitarian crisis inside Syria. In the aftermath, Pence was left spinning how Trump’s saying “he and I haven’t spoken and I disagree” isn’t actually a disagreement.

Clinton came in with an entirely different strategy than the first debate, when she pestered Trump into losing his cool. At the rematch Sunday, she seemed content for Trump to do his own digging, even as she was forced to answer for a series of damaging storylines.

Clinton said she would “go high,” though, in fact, she kept her main critique of Trump alive.

“It’s just awfully good that someone with the temperament of Donald Trump is not in charge of the law in our country,” she said.

“Because you’d be in jail,” Trump countered.

It’s fair to surmise that Trump stopped his campaign bleeding with his performance Sunday night. But his is a campaign suffering from more than mere cuts and scratches; the blood lost already is unlikely to flow back into the patient.

Some Republicans were even privately rooting for a full-on Trump implosion, to give license to more party members to cut loose of Trump. They didn’t get that, but neither did they get the kind of rousing resurgence that suggests a campaign turnaround is at hand.

Trump is making clear that he intends to end his campaign how it started. He may wind up as lonely as he was back when nobody gave him a chance.

But he won’t go down without a fight, and a show.