I suppose one could call what happened last night a presidential debate, although it certainly should not be given that distinction. The word presidential evokes strength, clear leadership and respect for America, its allies and its citizens.
The word debate implies an exchange of ideas. It implies some level of skillful articulation of one’s perspectives. For so long in America, presidential debates were about differing liberal and conservative views about the best path forward for America.
Vice President Kamala Harris was presidential, and she was ready for a debate. Former President Donald Trump was as ever unpresidential and unfit for the office, with no ability or interest in debating.
Candidates used to agree on fundamental principles, chief among them the peaceful transfer of power, which the former president only supports when he wins. The biggest threat to American democracy since the Civil War was on a Pennsylvania debate stage last night.
That threat comes in the form of a petulant toddler. Last night, he threw his food all over the room. He got fussy repeatedly. He wailed an incoherent babble he must have learned from the internet. Last night’s display of Trump’s sheer stupidity was not a surprise to anyone with the ability to see, hear or just generally perceive reality.
After Trump watched President Joe Biden struggle to speak clearly in June, he flailed wildly as the career prosecutor Harris carved him up like a sweating defendant under cross-examination.
After Trump referred to the reversal of Roe v. Wade as something people “wanted,” Harris replied that “pregnant women who want to carry a pregnancy to term suffering from a miscarriage, being denied care in an emergency room because the health care providers are afraid they might go to jail and she’s bleeding out in a car in the parking lot? She didn’t want that. Her husband didn’t want that. A 12 or 13-year-old survivor of incest being forced to carry a pregnancy to term? They don’t want that.”
From that moment, it was off to the races. Repeatedly, Harris gave cohesive answers on policy and prosecuted the case against Trump. Trump, as always, showed more concern for his most important constituent: his ego. He argued with childlike fury: “People don’t leave my rallies. We have the biggest rallies.”
Harris reminded us “Donald Trump was fired by 81 million people… And clearly, he is having a very difficult time processing that. But we cannot afford to have a president of the United States who attempts… to upend the will of the voters in a free and fair election.”
Immediately after Harris referenced some of the bizarre things Trump says at his rallies, Trump had one of many opportunities to calm skeptical voters, to make the case that he too can focus on the issues that matter to people: individual rights, affordability, health care, etc.
He responded: “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs. The people that came in. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating — they’re eating the pets of the people that live there…The people on television say my dog was taken and used for food”
When asked if he could acknowledge that he lost the 2020 election, he said, “No, I don’t acknowledge that at all.”
Sometimes people treat Trump supporters with kid gloves. They baby them and try to explain away why people would support this twice-impeached insurrectionist felon found liable for sexual abuse.
Anybody still along for this ride has thrown in the towel on truth. The billionaires funding him that know the truth but want lower taxes at all costs are one thing. But his loyal supporters, his rally-attenders, have been duped by a carnival barker who can never be wrong and can never lose.
People are so devoid of critical thinking that they vote against the candidates who are for their interests. Trump loves, in his words, “the poorly educated” for a reason. They are easier to lie to. He has been doing it since 2015, and last night was just another fraud in the ilk of Trump University.
Journalist Laurence O’Donnell once remarked upon listening to a sentence of Trump’s bile: “Imagine how stupid you have to be to say that. Then imagine how stupid you have to be to clap for it.”
Taking it a step further, imagine how stupid you must be to vote for that. There cannot be more of them than there are of us. There were not in 2020, and after an attempted coup, the reversal of the right to choose and thirty-four felony counts, it is past time for this national embarrassment to be voted out of the political scene and escorted to his criminal sentencing.
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