In a sane, normal and functional democracy — and even in a mildly dysfunctional one, which is a widespread condition these days — Donald Trump’s appalling performance in Tuesday night’s presidential debate would not just have ensured his electoral defeat but ended his career as a public figure. But — and you know where I’m going here — we do not live in such a democracy.
Whether we live in one at all, indeed, is up for debate. Yes, we still hold elections that are not entirely predictable in advance (although, way too much of the time, they are), and whose winners get to assume positions of authority. But the popular superstition that purportedly “free and fair” elections between rival gangs of millionaires equates to democracy is one of the most dangerous of American delusions. We went from two wildly unpopular geriatric candidates stuffed with dark money, who transparently did not reflect majority opinion on a wide range of issues, to just one of those plus a last-minute substitute, chosen in desperation with no semblance of a democratic process, who has ridden a wave of exuberance based on nothing more than novelty and sheer relief. Those emotions are highly understandable, but do we have to pretend that anything about that is healthy?
Too many of us in the media have made jokes over the past decade about living in the “worst timeline,” or suggesting that the godlike alien authors of this simulation should simply switch it off. But the anxiety beneath such alleged witticisms is deeply troubling: Facing the fact that this is our reality, and that you and I will never get to live in any other hypothetical sliding-doors universe, is acutely painful.
There is a profound darkness within America, a widely shared sensation that something has gone wrong, even if we can’t quite identify it and don’t remotely agree about what’s causing it. That feeling of rootlessness and discontent, of society coming unstuck — the academic term is anomie — definitely isn’t unique to this country, but it gets massively amplified by our national narcissism and our physical isolation. Nearly all of us feel it, regardless of where we live or who we vote for. (If we conclude it’s worth voting for anyone at all, that is; nearly one-third of adult citizens never even bother.)
One tangible symptom of that darkness is the fact that a visibly disordered man appeared on television before a worldwide audience and delivered an angry, incoherent diatribe fueled by grotesque fantasies about baby-killing doctors and cat-eating Haitians, and that he appears, two days later, to have only slightly diminished his 50/50 chance of being elected president.
Certainly Kamala Harris deserves some of the credit, if that’s the right word, for Trump’s thorough self-beclowning. She was competent and controlled, did not raise her voice or lose her temper, and generally managed to avoid perplexing policy questions by setting obvious rhetorical traps for Trump, into which he tumbled over and over again. Now we are forced to ponder unanswerable or metaphysical questions about whether Harris appeared sufficiently presidential, and how wavering independents or notional “undecided” voters in a handful of swing states, who have somehow avoided drawing any firm conclusions about Donald Trump, interpreted this spectacle. The real and glaringly obvious question is admittedly harder to face: How the hell did we wind up here?
As various commentators have observed lately, summarizing or paraphrasing the things Trump says can amount to “sanewashing” him, lending his remarks a clarity or sense of direction they almost never possess. On the other hand, accurately transcribing and reproducing Trump’s belligerent rants about Hannibal Lecter, Venezuela, the all-purpose panacea of tariffs (!), his “radical left liberal” opponents who seek to perform “transgender surgeries on illegal aliens” and the alleged million-dollar bribes paid to Joe Biden by “the mayor of Moscow’s wife” — fact-check that, libtards! — is like spending too much time reading H.P. Lovecraft’s “Necronomicon,” the book of forbidden knowledge that drives you mad.
I actually spent 10 or 15 minutes of my allotted time on this Earth trying to identify “Abdul,” the Taliban leader Trump purportedly cowed into submission with a threatened drone strike. I’m sure you’ll be surprised to learn that no one of that name, or anything close to that name, has ever been a major military or political figure in the Taliban, and that news accounts of the Trump administration’s negotiations with that group suggest its leaders were treated with great solicitude. It’s true, however, that the Trump team authorized many drone killings in Afghanistan (as did the Obama and Biden teams), a significant proportion of which — the exact number is a state secret — were war crimes against unarmed civilians.
That digression isn’t entirely irrelevant: The drone wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and other places we were never officially told about have been consigned to the memory hole, along with the entire tragic and gruesome history of America’s misbegotten 20-year war in the Middle East. But nothing could more clearly symbolize the dark places in America’s troubled conscience, where we’re dimly aware that we don’t know the real story, and it’s not unreasonable to assume the worst.
Trump’s distinctive and probably unconscious political genius was to channel that American darkness while also vowing to defeat it, and for years that contradiction was his strength, not his weakness. He was the “antiwar” candidate who promised to bring back torture, the crusader for the “forgotten man” who gave huge tax breaks to the wealthy, the builder of imaginary border walls, nonexistent health care plans and vaporware agreements with foreign tyrants.
The “American carnage” of Trump’s inaugural address was more like an erotic fantasy than a depiction of reality. As George W. Bush reportedly said to Michelle Obama at the time, “That was some weird shit,” and if W. were capable of honest self-reflection about his own role in brewing it … but let’s not go there.
Isn't there a word for the political system that thrives on unfocused discontent, in which an autocratic leader seeks to combine incompatible ideologies and overcome class divisions in pursuit of impossible goals, while both threatening and promising apocalypse? I'll think of it later.
It’s not exactly breaking news that Trump’s delusional, conspiratorial rants are grounded in the most depressing and small-minded kinds of bigotry rather than facts, and that his core audiences like it that way. Right-wing commentators spent an entire day feigning outrage that ABC’s debate moderators dared to challenge at least a few of the ex-president’s blatantly false assertions. But asking whether Trump actually believes the outrageous things he says, whether his followers take them literally and whether fact-checking serves any real purpose amid a thundering Niagara of lies is largely missing the point.
Of course we could find MAGA true believers who have imbibed not just the Trumpian Kool-aid but paid hundreds of dollars for the Trump-branded smiley-face pitcher it came in, and who adjust their views daily to conform to their cult leader's latest utterances. But most of Trump's voters, I suspect, see themselves as knowing participants in the con. They judge their god-emperor on style rather than substance, and understand truth as an endlessly fungible cryptocurrency compared to wicked memes and liberal tears. What was truly damaging about Tuesday’s debate, in that regard, was not that Trump got fact-checked (lol who cares!) but that he got owned, pantsed, Melvined and defenestrated, and clearly knew it. Snowflakes were triggered, and flung their tear-soaked red hats to the ground.
The Washington Post convened a mini-focus group of about 25 supposedly uncommitted voters in swing states — a methodologically murky sample with no statistical or predictive value, to be clear — and the short-term news was clearly positive for Harris. Nearly all participants said she'd won the debate, and a couple of previously Trump-friendly voters now said they leaned toward Harris.
Most readers probably got no further than that: Phew, democracy saved and all! But if you pushed past the top-line data into what those folks actually said, it got a whole lot darker: The sense of discontent was pervasive and nonpartisan, as was a shared awareness that nothing that happens in November is likely to fix it. Melissa, a 40ish woman in Nevada, said she leaned toward Harris on reproductive rights, but strongly favored Trump on the economy. She appreciated “his strong views” and trusted “his ability to make strong, decisive choices.” Seriously, that was Melissa’s verdict on the guy who said Democrats would allow doctors to “execute the baby” in the delivery room: Strong views!
A plurality of the group, including several likely Harris voters, agreed with Trump’s statement that “[W]e have a nation in decline. … We have a nation that is dying.” According to Alexander in Arizona, a young white man who leans toward Harris, “Our economy is dying, and the American dream for the next generation seems extremely bleak.” Tamara in Michigan, a young white woman who remains undecided, said, “We need substance from both candidates, and we are not getting it.” Debra in Pennsylvania, an older white woman who went into the evening leaning toward Trump, concluded, “I don’t want to vote for either of them.”
Steven in Nevada, a middle-aged white man and likely Harris voter, was agnostic on Trump’s decline comment, but not in a good way. Let's commend him for brevity: “I think the world is in decline,” he said, “not necessarily the USA.”
