A Dog Eat Trump Debate

Modern presidential debates are not debates—no Lincoln and Douglas contending on slavery, not even a mid-Atlantic high school forensic regional on the gold standard. For decades now, presidential encouters fail to reach such heights and are merely the political equivalent of an Mixed Martial Arts Main Event hosted at the D.C. Armory,

Explain the economy in two minutes without notes—Go. What to do about China—60 seconds left. Little useful information is eventually shared. No exchanges that develop deeper understanding or illuminate policy differences between parties occur. No, a debate formatted for short attention spans and commercial breaks leaves us with rhetorical elbows to the head, liver shots and arm bars, with pundits keeping score cards while America watches a rhetorical bar fight.

Now, following this nearly over-wrought metaphor, Harris rope-a-doped Trump. Crowds leaving. Laughing at you. Weak. Confused. Disgrace. Voters fired you. Left us a mess. She just leaned back and got the big orange gorilla to punch his way to crazytown. Trump apparently spoke for five more minutes than Harris—a prima facie white privilege win. But fighting the moderator on immigrants eating dogs cost about 20 seconds. Wailing against solar panels covering desert soil and gender assignment surgery for illegal immigrant prisoners—that ate time. But Trump’s perserverative evocations of a comically large number of migrants from jails and mental institutions lowering crime in Venezuela, was the real clock eater. He did little effective with his time.

Trump had a few moments of sanity. Biden kept my tarriffs. Promising student loan forgiveness, but failing to deliver. Why haven’t you done these things wonderful things in the three and a half years you’ve had? But in its entirity, the few genuinely undecided voters watching saw a sane professional public servent talking policies and their drunk Q-anon uncle yelling at imagined Black Lives Matter protestors to stay off his lawn. Any voter claiming undecided today are, in truth, a Trump voter desperatly trying to find a reason to say so without looking racist or crazy to their friends.

The only use for such debates is to see how candidates hold up under the stress of a ridiculous format and constant pundit scrutiny. They are pressure tests and participants either pass or fail. Voters will never say this, but they often just want to see who would be the last candidate standing in a cage match. After the Biden-Trump debate, Democrats quickly jumped to a candidate they thought would win such a fight. And Harris did so in this first debate. What is missing the day after is any panicked discussion of how impaired Trump is after his dog eating his concept of a plan performance, based entirely on OAN, Fox and Brietbart news clips. J.D. Vance, grown in a Nazi lab as he is, would have faired better debating simply because he would perseverate less and put forward comprehesible, albeit fascistic, positions. Trump has never been a master orator, but he had been adept at a salesman vagueness that supporters filled in with their own beliefs. But now, deep into his third presidential campaign, he is hopelessly mired in grievence while fading into his own characture.

Harris did the only thing a candidate could do in this debate—how herself as a sane person who cares about people and possesses far more than a concept of a plan to improve the lives of not rich Americans. And it was good enough for Taylor Swift, so there you go.