LAS VEGAS: Donald Trump and Joe Biden debated. Americans cringed.
After the presidential candidates put on one of the noisiest, most chaotic debates in recent memory, voters across the country struggled for words printable words to describe the display. Many went first to profanities. Others landed on more polite, but still biting, terms for the live, prime-time event, long considered evidence of the rigors of U.S. democracy: A joke, a disgrace and so disrespectful.
I was sad. It was sad, and it was very pathetic, said Rickey Hampton, as the 54-year-old stood inside the doorway of his Las Vegas apartment.
It was another day of reckoning with the nations rapidly transforming political culture and its seemingly irreparable divisions. In interviews with voters across key states in the contest, those who watched the spectacle nearly unanimously recoiled from it. Many said Trump was the…