If two people agree to a debate, but one of them participates in bad faith, and spends the majority of the time talking over the other, sidestepping virtually every point their counterpart makes, blatantly lies, employs personal insults and frequently airs irrelevant grievances, is it still considered a debate?
It’s not a debate in the traditional sense. If you were on a High School debate team and did this you would get thrown off the team. But those debates have moderators and coaches whose goal is to get the kids to improve how they think and how they present their arguments. And perhaps most importantly, there is not an army of journalists looking to distill the debate into 10-second sound bites for the next week.
Modern political debates are really elongated ads. Each candidate is selling themselves to voters. If one candidate decides that the behavior you describe will get more voters to buy in, and they turn out to be correct, then they did well in the debate, no matter what the country’s Model UN moderators might think.
Still, the debates are important because it will likely be the only chance we get to see the candidates respond to each other, in real time. Particularly in this election, where the fitness of both candidates is in question. This will be the only chance for voters to find out how each candidate really gets it, without a media filter in front of them.
Sadly, only the left half of the voters care anything about their candidate acting with any degree of decency. The other half don’t deplore their bad-faith candidate’s rudeness and dishonesty, they revel in it.