It’s been a good week for US Democrats, superficially. Kamala Harris won the first TV debate and has a chance of winning the US election.

So why that unshakeable feeling of foreboding? Because this week’s debate confronted us with the utter degradation of truth in politics. The danger that creates will long outlast Donald Trump.

In the course of nearly two hours of rambling misinformation and outright lies by Trump, two moments stood out for sheer objectionable dishonesty.

The first – and I apologise for the offensive nature of this quote – was when the former president claimed that Democrats in some states support abortions “after birth” and the “execution” of babies. Yes, you read that correctly.

It’s not just the outrageous lie itself that stands out, though it’s nasty even for him, but the normalised nature of it. Linsey Davis of ABC let Trump finish his rant before coldly stating there was no state in America where it was legal to kill a baby after it was born.

Then Harris, who spent much of the debate shaking her head and looking pityingly at Trump, said merely that “you’re going to hear a bunch of lies,” before moving on to detail the impact of Trump’s abortion ban.

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That was it until later when she came back on him, calling the claim insulting to women.

Good God, you can say that again. Can you imagine if John McCain had made that claim in 2008 or Mitt Romney in 2012? Their credibility, morality, judgment and sanity would all have come under attack, including from members of their own side. It would have been one of the top stories of the campaign, but Trump says it and it doesn’t even make it into some of the news reports. The smear itself was not new, so Harris will have heard it before, but that made it more rather than less reprehensible. The ad nauseam repetition of lies is one of Trump’s most effective plays.

This is the reality of living in a “post-truth” era. So comprehensively has he laid waste to decency in US politics, that Donald Trump says Democrats want to execute babies and it’s as if he’s merely misquoted trade figures.

Harris was more effective later deploying ridicule, erupting in laughter and calling him extreme when Trump claimed “immigrants” were eating people’s pets – absolute garbage, by the way, as the moderator made clear. But overall, the drivel spewing from Trump’s podium met with oddly lacklustre challenge. It was disquieting. Harris preferred to attack his record and the moderators did their best but were not helped by having to try and be even-handed in spite of Trump’s blatant lying.

This speaks to a deeper malaise that hung like a toxic cloud over the whole gig, namely that the defenders of democracy feel disempowered. They still haven’t found a way to tackle orchestrated, shameless lies, knowing that rebuttal and the promotion of facts doesn’t change many minds. The Harris strategy – prioritising goading Trump into losing his cool, attacking his record, positioning herself as the one with the plan – is the Harris strategy because it’s more likely to win support than expending time and effort trying to convince partisan voters that their man is telling whoppers. Meanwhile, voters become ever more cynical and confused.

Kamala Harris (Image: Alex Brandon)

Falsehoods like immigrants feasting on Tiddles and Rover didn’t just come out of nowhere. The erosion of respect for truth has been a slow-motion tragedy, unfolding for a decade, from the Birther myth to the stolen election. The effect of it all will continue long after Donald Trump leaves the political stage, though there’s no imminent prospect of that.

If Harris wins November’s election – the candidates are neck and neck with the impact of the TV debate yet to show through – you might expect that Trump would be finished. Losing two elections in a row would create civil war inside most large parties; it would certainly see the leader replaced.

But not so the Republicans, because Donald Trump’s ruse of denying election results and bullying internal dissenters has inoculated him against reprisals. Republican Congressmen and women have been craven participants in this game of Emperor’s new clothes. Trump’s court of suck-ups and cynics perpetuate the election denial to the Maga rank-and-file on a grand scale and the giant falsehood, built up and up and up, protects Trump like a fortress.

You’d like to think if he lost it would be the end of the divisive politics and the conspiracy-fuelled Maga movement but so huge has it become, so self-sustaining the radical right social media ecosystem and so unmoored from reality, that objective reality does not intrude upon it much.

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Trump can never “lose”. If Harris wins on November 5, he’ll claim she stole it as a matter of course. Republicans are better prepared this time to performatively challenge the election results, deliberately working up their base with the idea of “non-citizens” on voter rolls, even though it’s very rare. Republican-allied local election officials are also expected to try and block or delay the certification of local results on principle. Trump only has to convince his millions of supporters that he won and the nightmare will continue.

We may wait in vain for a palace coup at Mar a Lago, but it’s true that time will eventually catch up with the 78-year-old Trump, now very much the doddery candidate. So what if it does, though? The movement will be bequeathed to a racist, misogynist democracy-denier in his own image because there’s no one else left. The post-truth era stretches before us indefinitely.

And if he wins? Well if he wins, the world will be a darker place. A clear majority of Britons want Harris to win. Whatever Trumpian contortions we have been through here, Boris Johnson was ultimately hounded out of parliament by his own peers because he told lies. The threat has not gone, but the British public and parliament showed there was a limit to the dishonesty they would tolerate.

A Trump win in November will only embolden those who would take us back to that shameful era.