Before I dampen your expectations about the impending Harris-Trump debate (“will she kick his ass?”) by contending that it may prove to be meaningless, it’s worth pointing out that, in essence, the pairing itself is ludicrous. We have devolved to the point where an unhinged convicted criminal who’s been indicted for trying to overthrow the government gets to share the stage and sell his serial lies.
On that metric alone, this election should already be game over. Even Dick Cheney says that. But alas, roughly half the electorate is still gargling Trump’s swill, so the pre-debate speculation is all about What Harris Needs to Do. Is there any way she can put down the mad dog and blow this race wide open? Hillary Clinton offered some advice in yesterday’s New York Times: “He can be rattled. He doesn’t know how to respond to substantive, direct attacks…I mean, when I said he was a Russian puppet and he just sputtered onstage, I think that’s an example of how you get out a fact about him that really unnerves him.”
Oh yeah? And how did that election work out for her?
I groaned when I read her comment. Hence my point:
She and Trump debated three times in 2016. Debate experts agreed that she won all three. The conservative Washington Examiner concluded that “barring something terrestrial, this race is over,” and, that, referring to Trump, “the goose has cooked himself.” Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal editorial page pronounced Trump dead and buried: “The (election) result will be one that he has earned.” But in the end, Clinton’s debate victories proved meaningless. A mere 77,000 voters in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin tilted the Electoral College to Trump. Either they didn’t pay attention to how badly he was humiliated during the debates, or they didn’t care, or they didn’t bother to watch.
So, for now, my expectations for the ’24 debate are tempered by the curse of institutional memory. Clinton on the debate stage exposed Trump as a deadbeat who didn’t care about working people (“Donald, I’ve met dishwashers, painters, architects, glass installers, marble installers, drapery installers, like my dad was, who you refused to pay”), but it didn’t matter.
Clinton hammered him with the sexual assault allegations that had already been lodged against him (“he said he could not possibly have done those things to those women because they were not ‘attractive’ enough for them to be assaulted”), but it didn’t matter.
Clinton rattled him so badly that he sputtered an authoritarian threat about jailing his political enemies, starting with her (“If I win, I am going to instruct my attorney general to get a special prosecutor to look into your situation”), but it didn’t matter.
And yes, she did nail him for being Putin’s fanboy (“I know Donald is very praiseworthy of Vladimir Putin,” someone who “would rather have a puppet as president of the United States”), but it didn’t matter.
For Kamala Harris tomorrow night, those are all potential avenues of prosecutorial attack. Granted, she can perhaps succeed where Clinton failed, for several potential reasons: (1) Clinton was weighed down by lots of political baggage after a quarter century on the national scene, whereas Harris is a relatively new face who’s still defining herself, and (2) Trump’s cesspool is deeper than ever, with all his latest batshittery about schools performing trans surgeries on students (huh?) and bacon prices going up when the wind doesn’t blow (huh?) and, how under his next regime, local election officials who certified his 2020 loss deserve “long-term prison sentences.”
But here’s the basic problem: There is no longer a broad consensus on reality. We live in an era of customized disinformation; a massive share of the potential debate audience is impervious to fact-based communication. What does it say about the health of this nation that Harris could eviscerate Trump and still fail to move the polling needle? A potentially fatal share of Americans seem delighted to forfeit their cognitive faculties and drown themselves in the firehouse of falsehood.
Hannah Arendt, the late German-American historian and philosopher, having studied 20th century fascism, wrote: “The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world – and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end – is being destroyed.”
Arendt has been gone for nearly 50 years. Imagine what she’d say now.
But I so hope that my skepticism about the impending debate is proven wrong.