Donald Trump had a bad day
Many words have been written and spoken already about Tuesday night’s debate, but in the end, it may come down to simply this:
One person kept her composure. The other person lost his temper and his control over several bodily systems.
Much has changed in this land since the Great Darkness of 2015 and the Rise of Orange Sauron. It’s hard to know whether certain things mean what they used to mean.
In the before times, if you exhibited persistent signs of zombie rage virus during a presidential debate, if you wigged out and started yelling and never really regained any self-control over the span of an hour, you probably lost both the debate and the election.
I say “probably,” because nothing like Tuesday night has ever really happened before. The goal has usually been to seem unflustered. Think Ronald Reagan. Think Barack Obama. One is permitted an edgy moment. One is allowed a momentary flash of anger. But not the protracted red-faced yowling of an infant with a full diaper.
His words — even the words about Dog Florentine and Cat a l’Orange, even such Google-translated Romulan declarations as “I have concepts of a plan” — became less important. You could turn the sound off and see what was happening.
We got a taste of the way Donald Trump chews out his staff, except this time he was reaming out America for not loving him enough.
Early in the debate, Trump used the verb “fire” five times in one answer, e.g. “I fired most of those people, not too graciously.”
A little bit later, Kamala Harris said, of the 2020 election, “Donald Trump was fired by 81 million people. So, let’s be clear about that. And clearly, he is having a very difficult time processing that.”
She continued in this vein rather effectively while Trump tried out a series of facial reactions, like someone attempting to choose the right emoji in a text thread that was going south.
She continued in this vein rather effectively while Trump tried out a series of facial reactions, like someone attempting to choose the right emoji in a text thread that was going south.
A few years back, I was working on a magazine profile of a boxer. I spent a lot of time at the fights. It became evident that the ideal strategy was to gain some kind of temporary advantage over your opponent — hurt him a little, make him stagger — and then begin cutting down the size of the ring until the other guy had no place to go and no option other than to absorb more punishment. (Boxing is more like chess than most people realize.)
That is what happened Wednesday night, and it began immediately with that handshake. Maybe you remember 2016 when Trump stalked Hillary Clinton around the stage. This time, Harris moved right into his space, appearing to startle him.
And then came her first real flurry of punches: “I’m going to invite you to attend one of Donald Trump’s rallies … he talks about fictional characters like Hannibal Lecter. He will talk about (how) windmills cause cancer. And what you will also notice is that people start leaving his rallies early out of exhaustion and boredom.”
I’m not sure how accurate or pervasively true that last statement was, but another thing Harris did was to take advantage of the new rules promulgated by Trump himself. During the last nine years, he has lowered the standards from truth to truthiness. He has substituted, for rapier wit, the wild hurling of greasy spaghetti handfuls.
Harris is the first opponent to realize you can accuse Trump of threatening a “bloodbath” if he loses the election, and then let him try to explain that he meant something else. Which he probably did. But he has created a world where accuracy and intention are considerably less important.
The notion of Irish goodbyes at his rallies was devastating. My friend Bill Curry once said, “Most people who go into politics are trying to address some psychic chasm, some chronic emotional abyss. And what they don’t realize is, it’s the worst place to do that.”
Trump has spent his life trying to use sex and
money and celebrity to numb some primal pain or to sate some unappeasable hunger. None of that seemed to work as well as his discovery of the adoring rally crowd, whose cheers and applause were like auditory ketamine.
The shame of those people possibly walking out on him was too much to bear. He began to flail.
As I said at the outset, it’s hard to calculate how much this sort of thrashing will matter. A 5’4” woman dragged a 6’3” man around the ring by his big red necktie. It’s the opposite of the story of dominance that serves as Trump’s principal narrative.
He became, in the spirit of Charlie Brown and David Copperfeld, the person to whom things are happening. Harris was Snoopy and Steerforth, snatching away his treasures.
At the end of the night, we found out that Taylor Swift had emphatically endorsed Harris.
When things go wrong
Colin McEnroe’s column appears every Sunday, his newsletter comes out every Tuesday and you can hear his radio show every weekday on WNPR 90.5 or podcast any time at ctpublic.org/colin. Email him at colin@ctpublic.org. Sign up for his free newsletter at http://bit.ly/colinmcenroe.