Trump has been poisoned by the red pill
Trump has been poisoned by the red pill
On the debate and what people heard
Welcome to a Wednesday edition of Progress Report.
So, who watched the debate? I wouldn’t call it entertaining, but by minute two it was already an improvement on the Biden-Trump debate. Low bar, I know. Now that the reactions are in, let’s discuss what other people saw and the ramifications of it all.
Later this week, I’ll be launching a series of conversations with candidates and lawmakers about their races and the larger political issues in their cities and states.
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Here’s the baseline: Vice President Kamala Harris had a very good debate last night, projecting a mix of assertiveness, empathy, and command of the issues that made it easy to imagine her serving as president, even if you won’t always agree with her on everything. Her powerful answer on abortion and explanation of the “opportunity economy” were especially strong.
More importantly, without a visibly unwell Joe Biden on stage to distract viewers and dominate news coverage after the event, Americans there was nothing to distract from President Donald Trump’s lie-soaked rhetoric and his own borderline-senile mental state.
That being said, I know that I am intrinsically biased by objective reality, so I try to view these kind of artificial political events from the varying perspectives of a few major kinds of political consumer:
Informed progressives who understand policy and know too much about the latest right-wing media hysteria
Conspiracy-addled conservative lunatics
Conservatives who aren’t absolute lunatics
Normal people who aren’t obsessively following the news and moronic trends
Lucky souls who are just beginning to pay attention to the election
If you’re reading this newsletter, you’re almost assuredly in the first category, and thus probably pretty happy today. Again, Harris came across as well-prepared while Trump lied with abandon, failing to link her factually or really rhetorically with the problems we do face; he may have said “she’s the same as Biden,” but the vice president was able to create distance by introducing new ideas and criticizing Trump’s terrible plans, like his obsession with tariffs.
Instead of following-up, Trump’s broken brain repeatedly returned to far-right talking points, summoning the looks of incredulousness that Harris undoubtedly spent quite a while practicing and perfecting ahead of the debate. Anyone in the fourth or fifth category above was likely bewildered by some of the wild things that Trump said, including this rant, which sounded like my worst relatives from Queens and Long Island if they were seething about migrants:
To any normal person, or really anybody who lives in any kind of reality, this (along with his unhinged insistence on “post-birth” abortion) was likely a defining moment, with Trump screaming the most inane and horrible bullshit while Harris looked at him with bemusement. He looked even more idiotic when co-moderator David Muir corrected him, explaining that ABC News had contacted the officials in Springfield, OH and verified that no, Haitian immigrants have not been eating people’s pets. It was undoubtedly baffling to many Americans and a pressure valve laugh line for those who were watching and rooting for Trump to self-destruct.
The problem we face is that the far-right misinformation and media pipeline is now so powerful that shameless Republicans now eagerly adopt its talking points, compelling ostensibly objective major news outlets to devote time and space to fact-checking — and thus further amplifying — outlandish, bigoted, and dangerous rumors that far too many Americans are prone to believing.
Donald Trump began his political career as a birther clown and useful idiot on Fox News, and if the litmus test had ever been whether he was telling the truth, Donald Trump wouldn’t have made it past Iowa in 2016. He has moved the goalposts— or, the goalposts have been moved by the media in deference to his venomous lunacy — over and over again, to the point that lines about Haitian immigrants eating dogs are met with sober fact checks and laughter, not near-unanimous condemnation.
That leads to bloodless headlines from objective media like the supposedly liberal NPR, which treat these wild claims like they’re simply incorrect assertions:
CNN’s fact-checker counted 33 lies from Trump last night, only three of which were corrected by ABC’s moderators. There are millions of people who will believe almost all of them, or just enough to continue buying into his campaign, and frankly, at this part, nearly a decade into running for president, a sudden burst of fact-checking wouldn’t have shifted too many of those people.
The fact that Trump essentially doubled-down on his call for the execution of the Central Park Five barely even registered outside New York media.
The straight news coverage of the debate, meanwhile, largely failed everybody. This what the New York Times’s homepage looked like immediately after the debate:
He’s always been morally abhorrent, personally repellent, and physically repulsive, but the difference between Donald Trump of 2024 and previous election cycles is that he’s gone full red-pilled, robbing him of what had been an innate populist sense that connected with so many people.
Over the past four years, Trump, fuming over his election loss and legal trouble, has narrowed his media input to the cable networks who legitimize his fantasies and personal contacts to the yes-men and donors who surround him at Mar-a-Lago and show up at his rallies. His speeches have become saturated with the bullshit lies that are broadcast back to him on Fox and Newsmax and other niche far-right paranoias and obsessions.
Trump continues to earn cheers for his dementia-addled rants at his rallies, while many of his softer supporters experience him through quick clips and quips that generally come with media context. But this debate was pure, uncut Trump, goaded into his worst instincts by Harris, and pure Trump is a jumbled, sweaty mess of conspiracy theories and indecipherable recitations of the most awful right-wing internet bullshit. Most people do not watch his rallies, so this was in a way a re-introduction to Donald Trump, under pressure and without the benefit of a teleprompter.
For people who were hoping for some substance out of the candidates, to better understand their economic proposals, Trump offered nothing but obviously bogus rhetoric about tariffs and the same overtly racist bullshit about immigrants over and over again, to the point of being cognitively alarming. Republicans are calling it a disaster, Elon Musk admitted he lost, and now the right is accusing ABC’s moderators of bias, which is always the last pivot of desperation.
Seeing Biden near catatonic on stage in late June was eye-opening for enough people that he was forced out of the race. Trump wasn’t as feeble, but at the very least, no viewer walked away from that debate newly convinced that Trump is mentally, temperamentally, or intellectually ready to run the country.
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