Victory! It’s over! It’s done! It’s a triumph! Tay Tay has endorsed Kamala Harris for president!
In a post on Instagram after the debate, Swift noted:
I think she is a steady-handed, gifted leader and I believe we can accomplish so much more in this country if we are led by calm and not chaos.
Game changer! You know this is not a joke. You wish it was, but it ain’t.
The debate itself? Ehhhhhh… Well, it managed to be joyless, ugly and, what a Trump event has hitherto never been, dull. Harris won the thing as a debate, hands down, no question. Focused, rapid response, polished, on point, on the money.
Trump was at his worst, and by that I mean not ethically but performatively. Trump is now the political equivalent of the Grateful Dead (and looks it). You follow him around for years comparing 50-minute versions of “Dark Star”: “Yeah, that one wasn’t as bizarrely crappy as in Akron 1978.”
This really was one for completionists, his political nous and common touch collapsing into envy and persecution. Questioning Harris’s racial-cultural heritage was meant to go to her honesty, and that she was trying to be African-American Black, not Caribbean Black. But it sounded grotesque and old South Republican obsessive. Getting side-tracked on illegal immigrants eating cats in laneways made him sound — to continue the counterculture crossover theme — like an R. Crumb cartoon.
His attack in 2016 had been that they were “bringing in criminals, bringing in rapists”, etc, and that the US should build a wall. The wall didn’t get built and the wave of people crossing the border — as the global economy intensifies — is now a tsunami, but Trump’s focus on petty urban myths distracted.
The abortion stuff was equally ugly. But Trump was, in a way, not ineffective. Talking about nine-month and post-birth abortion was simply what is required of him by the evangelical right — the worse Trump is as a human being, the higher the political price goes — but he managed to avoid being tagged with a national abortion ban policy. That is going to matter to a lot of rustbelt and swing state voters, men and women, who might want both Trump and access to abortion under state law.
The crucial thing Harris didn’t do was demolish Trump on his record with the economy. That would not have been easy either. Trump’s presidency coincided with the last period of quantitative easing, keeping the Western economy pumped up. Biden’s presidency coincided with COVID’s economic effects, and the necessary end of quantitative easing as inflation began to ratchet up. Trump gets credit, Biden gets blame, even though his economic measures have been smarter and more far-reaching in steadily reconstructing the US economy.
Harris should have spent more time attacking Trump’s record as president — the factories didn’t really come back as people hoped — and suggesting that his current promises were more fantasy. That would have been a risky strategy: bombarding Trump with stats, a real economic lecture’s worth. Making the prosecutorial case to the people who may vote for Trump that he just can’t deliver, that he is selling them a fantasy, that there’s no easy road back to a revived America, but together blah blah blah…
The case isn’t made, and the Trump dream lives on. The progressives will bill and coo about how smooth and authoritative Harris is. They still won’t get that Trump, whether triumphant or angry and ragged, appeals to people by being the anti-Harris. They were listening, if they were watching, for a statement of intent on immigration and work, jobs, cost of living. They didn’t get it from Harris, and they got it from Trump just by Trump being Trump.
On a 50-50 split in the polls on popular vote, and without change in the polls before November, Donald Trump will lose or win the popular vote, and win in the electoral college.
Cos baby he’s a nightmare, dressed like a daydream…
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