Trump Self-Destructs

A Debate for the Ages.

It was a disaster. It was a catastrophe. It was elder abuse. It was a debate so bad for Donald Trump that armies of linguists and semioticians will labor for months to devise terms capable of describing the cataclysmic act of political self-destruction and career immolation we witnessed last night in Pennsylvania. It was a slaughter. An industrial-scale ass-whupping. It was a humiliation that needed only Trump in a gimp suit and a ball gag to make it complete.

I thought she’d do well.

I felt deep in my bones she had the mental acuity and canny political instinct to move faster, connect more deeply, and stay out of the Trumpian lies and conspiracy theories. I knew the prosecutor was coming to play, but no one saw this bloodbath coming.

On Monday, I told you Trump didn’t win the last debate, but Biden lost it.

Last night, Kamala Harris won the debate by a mile, and Trump lost it so catastrophically that America’s political class is reeling this morning. The Biden Debate Disaster now has a triumphant rival. Trump lost in ways I couldn’t have imagined. He lost on message, affect, physicality, tone, humor, connection, style, facts, reason, logic, consistency, and almost every other imaginable category.

She started it right, striding across the stage with some swagger to shake a surprised Trump’s hand. “Let’s have a good debate,” she said, and did she ever. From the jump, she was on message about improving the lives of Americans. Trump looked awful, with a bizarre new brown rinse to his hair helmet, four-toned makeup applied with more than his usual generosity, and a low-energy posture.

Harris set a tone and rattled Trump with her opening statement, which I quote here in its entirety because it was a beautiful set piece to start the night:

“So, I was raised as a middle-class kid. And I am actually the only person on this stage who has a plan that is about lifting up the middle class and working people of America. I believe in the ambition, the aspirations, the dreams of the American people. And that is why I imagine and have actually a plan to build what I call an opportunity economy. Because here's the thing. We know that we have a shortage of homes and housing, and the cost of housing is too expensive for far too many people. We know that young families need support to raise their children. And I intend on extending a tax cut for those families of $6,000, which is the largest child tax credit that we have given in a long time. So that those young families can afford to buy a crib, buy a car seat, buy clothes for their children. My passion, one of them, is small businesses. I was actually -- my mother raised my sister and me but there was a woman who helped raise us. We call her our second mother. She was a small business owner. I love our small businesses. My plan is to give a $50,000 tax deduction to start-up small businesses, knowing they are part of the backbone of America's economy. My opponent, on the other hand, his plan is to do what he has done before, which is to provide a tax cut for billionaires and big corporations, which will result in $5 trillion to America's deficit. My opponent has a plan that I call the Trump sales tax, which would be a 20% tax on everyday goods that you rely on to get through the month. Economists have said that Trump's sales tax would actually result for middle-class families in about $4,000 more a year because of his policies and his ideas about what should be the backs of middle-class people paying for tax cuts for billionaires.”

I emphasized a few lines because while the delivery was natural and almost conversational, she didn’t miss a messaging beat. She also laid the first landmine in the debate by mentioning Trump’s beloved, imaginary tariffs.

His first response told me all I needed to know about the night. There was no “Happy Trump” coming to play, as his desperate campaign had been wishing for in the press. I knew the night was off the rails when he started into the beloved, weird new MAGA conspiracy theory.

“You see what's happening with towns throughout the United States. You look at Springfield, Ohio. You look at Aurora in Colorado. They are taking over the towns. They're taking over buildings. They're going in violently. These are the people that she and Biden let into our country. And they're destroying our country. They're dangerous. They're at the highest level of criminality. And we have to get them out. We have to get them out fast.”

The minute he mentioned Springfield and Aurora, I knew what was coming, and so did you. Trump’s immersion in the right-wing media ecosystem is complete. Laura Loomer, one of his debate advisors — she was on the plane with him to Pennsylvania — and her ilk have been pushing this nonsense for weeks.

He took the hook on tariffs — a confusing, unpopular, and deeply wrong economic strategy — and dug into a deeper hole, swallowing her predicate and splurting out his usual combination of desperate self-regard - “I got billions from Chynnnna” and an entire Black Mass of voodoo economics before rocketing into the Golden Oldies of the Trump conspiracy handbook.

She baited the hook again by saying Goldman Sachs and Wharton School economists condemned his plan. Wharton, where Daddy Fred greased his slow son’s tenure, is one of Trump’s few signifiers of achievement, and he clings to it desperately. You could see her sly expression as he rolled on the floor like a drunk on fire. She had him on defense for a long block over the economy and even pinned him for sucking up to China’s President Xi during the COVID crisis. Trump had no control of his message or his emotions. Finally, he sputtered with another current right-wing media trope of “She's a Marxist. Everybody knows she's a Marxist. Her father's a Marxist professor in economics. And he taught her well.”

Her side-eye and amused smile were brutally dismissive.

On abortion, Trump flailed, twisted in the wind, and desperately tried to calibrate between his lies on the topic. He was caught between the Scylla of bragging about ending Roe, and the Charybdis of the deeply unpopular abortion restrictions passed in Republican states.

“Every legal scholar, every Democrat, every Republican, liberal, conservative, they all wanted this issue to be brought back to the states where the people could vote” is a failure mode he can’t escape, mainly as it’s just wrong in every dimension.

He led with the “They’re killing the babies after birth!” withstands as one of his more pernicious lies, and earned him a swift, decisive fact check from ABC’s Lindsey Davis: “There is no state in this country where it is legal to kill a baby after it's born. Madam Vice President, I want to get your response to President Trump.”

Harris answered with passion, heart, and sympathy for the damage Trump’s abortion decision has done to the women of America. She didn’t make it about the old Democratic Party trope on abortion; she made it about lives and hopes lost. We’ll leave Trump’s botched IVF answer — “I have been a leader in IVF, which is fertilization” to the dustbin of history.

After successfully baiting Trump on people walking out of his boring, discourse rallies, Harris clearly couldn’t believe her good fortune. Every Trump answer got wilder, more conspiratorial, and more bizarre.

In the greatest moment in modern debate history, we got this: “And look at what's happening to the towns all over the United States. And a lot of towns don't want to talk -- not going to be Aurora or Springfield. A lot of towns don't want to talk about it because they're so embarrassed by it. 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. And this is what's happening in our country.”

A bemused David Muir corrected Trump, and of course, Trump doubled down: “The people on television say my dog was taken and used for food. So maybe he said that and maybe that's a good thing to say for a city manager.”

He wouldn’t stop.

The reaction on the right was despair. This story is a chunk of right-wing agitporn, booming like a shockwave through the MAGA Outrage Machine right now, and Laura Loomer is just the type to have promoted it. They knew this was the moment Trump lost the debate, and anything that followed would be lost in the noise of the lie that Haitians are eating cats.

Erick Erickson posted: ”YOU STUPID MF’ers JUST GOT TRUMP TO REPEAT YOUR LIE ABOUT THE PETS. CONGRATS ON SETTING THE NEWS STORIES TOMORROW BY LYING SO TRUMP PICKS IT UP AND SAYS STUPID SHIT.”

The absolute unspinnable disaster ground on and on, with Trump’s eyes bouncing in his head like Pachinko balls, his answers ranging from incoherent to silly. Harris, with perfect physical presence, kept smiling at Trump with bemusement and disdain while he sputtered and grunted through his answers, and Mr. Tough Guy couldn’t look her in the eye, instead looking down and making his duck-face expression.

He refused to take a side in the Russian war against Ukraine (spoiler: he’s with Putin) and used Hungarian dictator Viktor Orban as a character reference. He dissed J.D. Vance. He lied — a lot — and never connected. Even his immigration hits seemed forced, and shouting them didn’t make it better. He defended his terrorist attack on the Capitol, repeated his “I won 2020” Big Lie, and reminded us exactly who and what he is: an old, deranged, mendacious, and cruel man without a single redeeming quality.

He helped many late-adopters—low-information voters who are starting to pay attention to the race about now—remember just how chaotic and crapulous his mental state is at all times. He talked about the imaginary version himself, and she talked about us. She talked about a bright future while he demeaned and insulted America, as he always does.

He didn’t win a single new voter. She most certainly did. The right’s response was dismal, blaming ABC for stacking the deck by correcting Trump’s lies. This is one of the more pathetic examples:

She had the right debate prep, skill set, and message. Most importantly, she had a plan from the very start to manipulate Trump’s emotions. It’s no wonder she wants another debate.

This was the cleanest win I’ve ever seen in a Presidential debate. It wasn’t even close.

P.S. To ice the cake of last night, Taylor Swift endorsed Harris. Naturally, the MAGA media machine will spend the day attacking her. Please proceed, boys. See how that works out for you.

P.P.S. Yes, she almost called him a “motherfucker” at one point last night. It was thisclose.