Donny, you're out of your element
I have watched every general election presidential debate since 2000. From 2000 to 2012, they were normal events as those kinds of debates go. Since 2016, they have been highly unusual because of Trump. He’s not a great debater, but he’s hard to deal with because it’s tough to focus on any one thing before the next tsunami of lies comes crashing down. Prior to Tuesday, no one who shared a debate stage with him had been able to rattle him and get him to lose it. Harris managed to do that.
The debates this year have been the worst and best. The debate in June was the most miserable thing I have ever watched, but it had a big silver lining. Normally, debates don’t happen until around October. Trump has made plenty of bad decisions, but, if he loses in November, his decision to agree to a debate in June will go down as one of the worst. Because Biden bombed so badly and a torrent of news came out about his condition, Democrats abandoned him and he dropped out.
Trump and other Republicans really didn’t think that would happen. Right up until Biden dropped out, as best I could tell, almost everyone in Republican circles thought he was going to stay in the race. Had the debate happened in October, it would have been after he was nominated and ballots were printed so Democrats would have been royally screwed. Trump could very well have waltzed his way back into the White House.
The debate on Tuesday was the best debate I have seen. Like virtually everyone, I think Harris did very well. She baited him and he took it. Her mocking his rallies messed up whatever plans he might have had and he never recovered from it.
I don’t agree with those saying Trump bombed. The Trump we saw on Tuesday is the same jackass he’s always been. What was different is he now has an opponent who is able to take advantage of his weaknesses. In the June debate, Biden did so horribly that it got all the attention. That’s different from Trump doing well. Trump did poorly, too, but it was overshadowed by Biden’s performance.
Let’s not get our hopes up too much. The debate is unlikely to be a big game changer. Polarization is very high and the election is still a long way away. By the time voting begins, the debate will probably be ancient history.
It has been good for generating positive news coverage for Harris and for fundraising. In the 24 hours after the debate, her campaign raised almost $50 million. I think it helped her introduce herself to more people who aren’t very familiar with her and she came off as strong, confident and well-prepared. She did sound a little nervous at first, but quickly found her rhythm and it was smooth sailing from there.
One of Trump’s biggest weaknesses is how easily he gets rattled over things that don’t matter. How big a candidate’s rally crowd sizes are is not important. If it was, Trump would have won all 50 states both times. He just can’t help himself. For whatever reason, crowd size is an obsession of his. Until running against Harris, none of his opponents could beat him at that.
Early in the debate, she talked about how people were leaving his rallies early because they’re bored. He said he has the biggest rallies ever and her rallies are all AI and paid people. From that moment on, he became crazier and non-sensical.
It wasn’t just what was said, but the body language, too. She walked over to him and shook his hand. When he was talking, she looked at the him and frequently laughed. He never once looked at her and often had his head down when she was talking.
In terms of answering the questions asked, both dodged most of them, but I doubt anyone will remember or care. She didn’t offer much in the way of policy details, but debates aren’t good forums for that. Presenting a detailed policy plan would require a whole day or longer and would be paid attention to by nobody. For those interested in policy details, she now has a whole host of issue stances listed on her website, which can be found here.
On domestic issues, I thought she was best when talking about abortion. He was not eager to talk about it and gave her campaign plenty of footage to use in ads. I liked how she called abortion bans “Trump abortion bans” and tied his Supreme Court appointments directly to Roe being reversed. For those who pay attention to politics, that connection is obvious, but there many out there who are pro-choice, but don’t follow politics closely and don’t yet connect those dots.
On foreign policy, she sounded like a pre-Trump Republican. She even gave a shout out to Dick and Liz Cheney. I wish I had a time machine so I could visit my college self and tell him he and the Cheneys will be voting for the same candidate in 15 years. Trump, when talking about foreign leaders, cited Viktor Orban as his character witness. A normal person would probably reconsider their life choices if their biggest fan was a dictator, but for Trump that’s a positive.
She even managed to pin Afghanistan on Trump and talked about him inviting the Taliban to Camp David and the deal he negotiated with them. She also defended the decision to withdraw. I think Biden made the right call and I don’t blame Trump for Afghanistan falling apart. I’m glad to be out of that place and don’t ever want to see another one of our troops set foot there again.
The moment in the debate that made me the happiest was when she talked about the record oil and gas production that has happened since 2021. I have been waiting all year to hear that. She tied it to fracking and reiterated her opposition to banning it. She didn’t mention the Inflation Reduction Act by name, but talked about its provisions supporting fracking.
Biden was never willing to talk about the record oil and gas production that has happened on his watch and it drove me off the wall. The only reason he was doing that was because he didn’t want to upset environmental groups. Harris clearly doesn’t have that worry and she doesn’t need to. Since Tuesday, I haven’t heard any of the usual suspects rail against her. I don’t know that she’s consciously doing it, but Harris is proving, one by one, that the loudmouths in the left-wing advocacy world are a bunch of paper tigers and can be ignored.
The funniest part of the debate was when Trump said he has “concepts of a plan.” The context was discussing what he wants to do about the Affordable Care Act. It was the first time I ever laughed when watching a debate. If I ever need to make an excuse for procrastinating, that will be my go-to phrase.
Thank you Elon Musk
It might sound like I’m suddenly switching gears, but bear with me. I have written before about Elon Musk and have defended him and I stand by it. He’s one of the greatest entrepreneurs of our time. Tesla and SpaceX are awesome and I’m glad he exists. He has done more to make electric cars a thing and to advance the energy transition than any private citizen has so far.
As a person, I have nothing but contempt for him. He’s loathsome, dishonest, insane, barely has a conscience, promotes conspiracy theories, is a culture warrior, sucks up to dictators and supports an aspiring dictator. In his defense, entrepreneurs like him with grand visions tend to be bad people. Steve Jobs was not a good person and neither was Bill Gates during his Microsoft years.
People like that have very different minds from the rest of us. They see things very differently and have much wilder imaginations. It would be nice to have a creative entrepreneur who is also a normal, decent person, but it’s a package deal. There are finite limits to what a normal, decent person can do. A normal, decent person doesn’t create Tesla and SpaceX.
It’s not just business entrepreneurs who are highly creative, but bad people. Pick your favorite painter and odds are they were a horrible person and didn’t live very long, i.e., Vincent Van Gogh. Musicians and other creative types can be like that, too. John Bonham was a great drummer, but he lived a reckless lifestyle and died at 32.
Where I’m going with all this is I’m thanking Musk from the bottom of my heart for buying Twitter, which he has since renamed X, and for making it a right-wing bastion. As someone who spends a lot of time on that site, I have noticed some significant changes since he took it over in October 2022. Namely, I have seen way more crazy stuff from the right than the left. Prior to his taking it over, it was the opposite.
Crazy stuff from the left still exists, but it has been swarmed by its right-wing counterpart. Thank god for that! I don’t think it’s healthy for either of our two major parties to be addicted to X, but if it has to be one I would much rather it be Republicans. Prior to Musk taking over, it was Democrats who tended to be addicted to it.
X is a fantasy world. Those who use it regularly, like yours truly, are wildly unrepresentative of the general public and the voters who decide elections. Spending a lot of time there can make someone forget that. If a candidate for office does that and runs a campaign based on what they see on X, it’s a big problem. Democrats used to have that problem, but now it’s a problem Republicans have.
I have written before about the 2019-20 Democratic presidential primary and have been very critical of how it went down. Many candidates, including Harris, went way out into left-field. X wasn’t the only reason for it, but it played a big role. It was on that site where the activist and far-left wings of the party were the most vocal and overrepresented. Candidates, and especially their staffers, got a very distorted sense of what Democratic voters wanted.
Crazy far-left ideas got a lot of airtime when actual Democratic voters weren’t asking for it. Democrats who use X are not at all like normal Democratic voters. Even though the right candidate was nominated, the bad influence of X still remained. It was on X where defund the police became a rallying cry and got elevated into the political discourse. It’s hard to prove, but I think X played the single biggest role in promoting wokeness during the Trump years. It definitely helped online left-wing mobs go after people who said anything not to their liking.
Fast forward to today and that fever has broken. The crazy left-wing stuff that was prevalent during the Trump years has sharply declined since. The Democratic National Convention was completely normal and free of left-wing craziness while the much hyped protests outside fizzled. The activist and far-left wings of the party’s influence today is a tiny fraction of what it was a short while ago.
When Musk took over X, it became much more right-wing friendly by his own design. Its algorithm has been changed to promote more right-wing accounts and crazy right-wing ideas. While there still are some Democratic elected officials who use X regularly, it is more often than not Republican elected officials who are hooked on it. That very much includes JD Vance, which brings us to a key moment in the debate on Tuesday.
I can imagine a vast majority of those watching were scratching their heads when they heard Trump talk about Aurora and Springfield and say immigrants were eating cats and dogs. I’m very online so I knew what Springfield was a reference to although I don’t know what Aurora is about. Springfield is a small city in Ohio that has recently had a large number of Haitian immigrants relocated there as part of a temporary program.
It’s not clear where it began, but somewhere in the right-wing social media fever swamp someone said Haitian immigrants were eating peoples’ pets. That happened sometime last weekend. On Monday, Vance promoted the idea on X. In less than a week, it went from a fringe idea confined to social media to being articulated by the Republican Party’s presidential nominee on the debate stage.
The whole story is completely made up. Literally no evidence exists for it, but that hasn’t stopped right-wing influencers and others on X and elsewhere from continuing to promote it. Trump is still talking about it. Vance said even if it’s not true people should still keep saying it is.
I wrote in my piece last week that Trump tends to be better at using normal words than his imitators are and that he comes off as less weird. I may have spoken too soon. The contrast between him and Harris couldn’t have been starker at that moment and for the rest of the debate. She sounded like a normal person while he sounded like an online comments section. Just as X had infected the minds of many Democratic presidential candidates in 2019-20, it has now infected the minds of the Republican presidential nominee and his running mate.
Trump, particularly since he picked Vance, has been running an extremely online campaign and it shows. On several occasions in the debate, Trump spoke as if everyone watching was a social media follower of his. Campaigns that are centered around X and other social media platforms tend to end poorly, i.e., Ron DeSantis. Being addicted to X leads candidates to focus on pleasing a small number of people with unusual interests. At best, those interests are completely foreign to normal people and otherwise are very unpopular.
Voters like candidates who are normal and don’t care for freaks. Obsessing over immigrants eating cats and dogs is as freakish as it gets. Odds are that story will disappear soon, but I’m sure there will be other crazy ideas that find their way from social media to Trump. No, it doesn’t mean Trump will lose, but every crazy idea he latches onto is one more missed opportunity to attack Harris and reminds people of what they don’t like about him.
Who knew Trump hangs out with bad people?
In light of Trump’s performance on Tuesday, attention has come to his hanging out with Laura Loomer. Never heard that name before? Good, that means you’re normal or at least way more normal than I am. She’s a far-right provocateur, entertainer, grifter, lunatic and bigot. Lately, she’s been accompanying Trump to and from his campaign events. Some in Trump’s world are none too pleased about it. As someone I follow on X put it, “The fascistic Trump advisers and the crooked Trump advisers are united with the stupid, the cowardly, and the opportunistic Trump advisers in their horror that they have all collectively been displaced by a batshit-crazy Trump adviser.”
There is a worry among many of Trump’s biggest supporters that she is influencing him and was part of the reason why he talked about Springfield in the debate. Their concern is if he keeps listening to her he could lose the election. Her racism is so bad she got called out by Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Some of her critics have decried her bigotry and expressed concern that by associating himself with her Trump could fracture MAGA. If Trump is associated with a bigot, the thinking goes, it will prevent a multi-racial working class coalition from coming together and sending him back to the White House. Trump must disavow her and the ugliness she represents. Who’s going to tell them?
I for one am shocked, just shocked that Trump would associate himself with someone like that. That’s not the Trump I know. The Trump I know is a good, decent, moral person who is kind, honest and brings people together. The Trump I know would never associate himself with bad people. He only hires and listens to the best people.
The only thing shocking to me is that anyone is shocked by Trump seeing her as a kindred spirit. They’re two peas in a pod. She flatters him and tells him what he wants to hear, which is all he’s ever cared about. That she’s a fellow lunatic, sociopath and con artist is a feature, not a bug.
This is what happens when a party ceases to have any positive vision for governing and devolves into a cult. By welcoming Trump into their tent, the Republican Party has given a green light for others to imitate him and to be their worst selves. Right now, the only thing that unites Republicans on the national level is hatred of Democrats and the left. As long as someone hates the same people they hate, they’re welcome in their ranks.
To use a recent example, two weeks ago Trump was endorsed by RFK Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard, the latter of whom “helped” him with his debate preparation. It must not have gone very well. RFK Jr. has never seen a conspiracy theory he didn’t like and Tulsi Gabbard is a shameless opportunist devoid of any real beliefs.
Neither of them are people are a sane, healthy party would want to be associated with and both were leftists until recently. Both of them, if they have any influence at all, will be likely to push for things that repel voters. Both are attention seeking snake oil sellers and will probably con plenty of Republicans soon enough. All that’s okay because they hate the right people.
It should come as no surprise that people like them and Loomer are liked by Trump. It would be a surprise if he didn’t like them. Remember, this is the same Trump who had dinner with Nick Fuentes, a well-known Holocaust denier. There is nobody he won’t associate himself with as long as they flatter him.
Trump is who he is. He’s always been a terrible person and always will be. A common argument from Republicans used to justify supporting him was that he would mature and grow into the role of being president. That didn’t happen and was never going to. What has changed is people in the Republican Party who once accurately described Trump as a threat and a menace are now repeating his lies and acting like him. Trump will never change, but he will change those who throw their lot in with him.