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GELFAND’S WORLD - Presidential debates are supposed to be a serious comparison of rival philosophies in governance. Think Lincoln v Douglas or Kennedy v Nixon. The Trump v. Harris debate will go down in history a little differently.
THEY'RE EATING THE DOGS !!!!!
In the immediately post-debate hours, it's become clear that this debate will be remembered more for comedy than for policy.
Here's how one wag combined a clip from The Simpsons with Donald's actual words and made it into a musical number. Honest, you gotta take a look. (The fictional town of Springfield is where the Simpsons live.)
There are several take-home lessons from Tuesday's event. Not the least of these is that Trump is caught in the right-wing bubble, and that bubble is itself several degrees apart from normal reality. There is a pretty good discussion of this topic by Eric Levitz at Vox which you can find here. We can provide the gist: The right-wing bubble where Trump dwells is full of conspiratorial stuff that most of the rest of us are blissfully unaware of. Two of the obsessional topics have been Aurora, Colorado and Springfield, Ohio. Down in that bubble, the Springfield story involves a rumor that Haitian immigrants have been catching and eating their neighbors' pets.
Any normal, non-conspiratorial person would treat the story as urban myth.
And that leads to another conclusion, although it's not that novel. The fact that Donald Trump thought to assert the dog-eating story shows just how gullible he is. You've got to be overly credulous to buy into that story. But more importantly, it shows just how intellectually lazy Trump actually is. Your first thought on hearing that story should be that it's likely not true, because it would have been verified by police agencies and news organizations if it were. Your second thought would be that if you are planning to repeat this story to the public, you ought to check it out first. And checking it out does not just mean that you believe every rumor that shows up on Truth Social or on X.
But Trump's intellectual laziness isn't a secret. It's exactly what hordes of his former subordinates have revealed in their many books about him.
Back to comedy for a moment. Late night comic Seth Meyers, who usually goes on at half-past midnight, was given an hour at 10 PM on Wednesday to do a summary of the debate. You can find links and a summary here.
And then there was Jon Stewart, who did a Jon Stewart job on Trump's answers. You can see a story on his show here.
You get the point. Trump's wild segue into petacide has taken over the discussion space. Every other element of the 90-minute debate is being forgotten as
THEY'RE EATING THE CATS !!!!!
You might wonder how many people saw the debate. It was just over 67 million people. Some of us will take that number with a small grain of salt (how many people are actually watching any one television set?) but it's probably a decent estimate, and can certainly be compared with official numbers from other televised events. The Academy Awards presentation has been averaging around 20 million viewers lately. The 2024 Super Bowl, the most watched television program of all time in the United States, had 123 million viewers. So this debate was almost exactly half the Super Bowl viewership.
There was clearly a lot of interest in this debate, and the numbers show it.
Were the ABC moderators on Kamala's side?
Donald Trump and Fox News commenters have referred to the debate as three against one, in the sense that the moderators and Kamala Harris were all on the same side. Curiously, I am partially sympathetic to this viewpoint. It was obvious to me (and fairly early on) that the ABC commenters were willing to give Trump plenty of rope. It's not their fault that he took it, but even in giving Trump extra chances to "respond" to Harris jibes, they were allowing Trump to make a fool of himself.
Trump and his supporters have criticized the moderators for fact checking several of Trump's claims. This is true, but to my mind it was defensible along the following lines:
When a serious candidate offers up claims that are clearly fantasy, demonstrably untrue, and meant to rouse the anger of viewers, it is not only the right, it is the clear duty of a journalist to point out the truth. Hence:
The Haitian population of Springfield, Ohio is not madly gobbling up all the neighborhood pets.
Post-birth murder of newborns is not legal in the United States in any state.
Official crime rates in this country are going down, not up under this administration.
Same old same old
The Trump playbook involves anger over imagined slights and demands for revenge. Thus it isn't surprising that Trump's response to his debate debacle is to demand that ABC be punished as a broadcaster, which you can read about here. Let's sit back and think about the double standard. Trump insists that he is being persecuted for speaking his mind, yet demands legal sanctions against any person or corporation who would assert the same free speech right.
In summary
Sometimes an old cliche is what the situation requires. So here goes: Kamala Harris wiped the floor with Donald Trump in their debate on Tuesday night.
Authoritarianism and dominance
I've been talking for years about something called right wing authoritarianism. You can read about it here. Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo has been bringing up a related topic, namely that Trump tries to dominate other people. He has managed to do so by calling them names, by belittling them, and by making up lies. It has worked all too often.
In dealing with Kamala Harris, Trump has been feeling around for an approach that would allow for a similar level of dominance. It has obviously failed, as the debate showed.
What's important to recognize is that Trump's ability to dominate is an important element in his ability to hold onto his more cult-like followers. If ever he proves to be the dominated rather than the dominant, that is the moment that he can no longer recruit followers who have the authoritarian personality mindset. In this sense, Tuesday night's debate may represent the peak of the Trump phenomenon and will signify the slow but inevitable decline.
And one last thing
The purest proof that Harris won the debate is the claim by right wing conspiracy theorists that she was getting speaking lines secretly through her earrings. Obviously this is an admission that her spoken lines were pretty good. But every question from the moderators was about an obvious topic, one for which any serious candidate would prepare for. She didn't need magic earrings to point out the obvious.
(Bob Gelfand writes on science, culture, and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected].)
