Election Watch # 7: Pre-“Debate”

Donald Trump’s incoherent rants this past week suggest he needs an intervention rather than a debate. So why is the media perpetuating the idea that it will be a “defining moment” for Kamala Harris?

Tomorrow is the Big Debate. The “Make or Break” moment. The “Showdown.” The “highly anticipated” evening when Donald Trump and Kamala Harris will finally come “Face to Face.”

What does She “have to do”? Introduce herself to “the American people.” “Define” herself. Show she is the “change candidate.” Distinguish her policies from Biden’s. Explain why her views on fracking and “the border” have changed. Get under his skin. But not too mean.

What does He “have to do”? Show up. And not be a raving lunatic.

Of course, they won’t say that.

They have to make it seem as though this will actually be a “debate.”

That means ignoring Donald’s unhinged rants over the past week. And that’s easy to do, when you only show snippets rather than, say, the 49 minute “press conference” outside a New York courtroom in which he charged, over and over, that every prosecutor, judge, and jury who were “against him” had been hand-picked by “Biden’s DOJ.” And then took no questions from the press. (And for some reason, the press wasn’t as furious with him as they were with Kamala Harris when she “avoided” meeting with them in the two weeks after the DNC, as she travelled across the Midwest, actually campaigning.)

I watched the entire 49-minute thing myself.¹It was a complete breakdown of any discipline he’d ever had over himself, an extended, repetitive, paranoid verbal tantrum in which he took advantage of the presence of the media to “take the stand” in his own defense—something he’d been cautioned not to do at the trial itself, and could not restrain himself from finally having the opportunity to do.

He’s done versions of this ever since he began to sense that perhaps he wouldn’t be a “winner” this time around. Lie, repeat, accuse others, lie, repeat, accuse others. Keep talking, flood listeners with the Trump versions of things.

He’s so rarely been called on it that he thinks he can still turn things around with it. And God help us, he may.

Just this past week or so, we’ve seen such a shocking level of—I don’t even know what to call it: Ignorance? Confusion? Breakdown of cognitive ability?

A few examples, along with examples of the media/press response.

From a Tuesday interview: “I was told if I got 63 million, which is what I got the first time [2016] 'You would win. You can't not win.' And I got millions more votes than that [in 2020] and lost by a whisker.”²

TV commentators, chyrons, and print headlines seized on Trump’s apparent admission—at long last—that he indeed lost the election, and merely chuckled over the fact that a candidate for President of the United States apparently has no idea how elections actually work.

The press also glossed over Trump’s astounding “critique” of gender-affirming health care for minors, as outlandishly false as his repeated claim that Democrats are in favor of post-birth abortion (that, if it actually ever happened, would more accurately be described as murder). On the transgender issue, he issued a warning to parents:

“Think of it, your kid goes to school and comes home a few days later with an operation. The school decides what’s going to happen with your child. And many of these childs, 15 years later say, what the hell happened? Who did this to me? They say, who did this to me? It’s incredible.”

Yes, it is incredible. Because it never happens. But it’s important to recognize that this isn’t a simple matter of “lying.” The fact that Trump imagines that anyone—not even the fiercest MAGAite—actually would buy the idea that schools have operating rooms for performing any kind of surgery, let alone genital-altering operations is…well, I don’t exactly know what to call it. Delusional?

This past week, Trump also told a reporter who asked about how he’d vote on an abortion amendment that he would “vote for” “more time than six weeks.” As though one has the option of “writing in” your own edits on a yes or no vote.

Maybe that was just sloppy talk, not actual confusion about what can and can’t be done on a ballot. But “sloppy talk” doesn’t adequately describe his unhinged ramble about childcare:

The way this answer was covered in the media is illuminating. While some newspapers and commentators noted how disorganized and meandering this answer was, it didn’t take long for their analysis to shift to Trump’s more sound-byte-friendly “childcare is childcare.” Others actually did the work of making sense of his answer for Trump:

No one pointed out that the childcare answer is actually a good example of a typical Trump escape-route, which he employed over and over in his debate with Biden: When you don’t actually know anything about the topic you’re being asked about, shift to a favored talking point (tariffs, the border) ramble on about it, and end with a grand slam at how Biden has trashed all Trump’s good work, turning us into a “failed” nation. Here’s an example—one of many I could have chosen—from the Biden/Trump debate. The question is, as it happens, about childcare:

TAPPER: The average cost of childcare in this country has risen to more than $11,000 a year per child.

For many families, the cost of childcare for two children is more than their rent. In your second term, what would you do to make childcare more affordable?

TRUMP: Just to go back. The general got fired because he was no good. And if he said that, that's why he made it up. But we have 19 people that said I didn't say it, and they're very highly respected, much more so than him.

The other thing is, he doesn't fire people. He never fired people. I've never seen him fire anybody. I did fire a lot. I fired Comey because he was no good. I fired a lot of the top people at the FBl, drained the swamp. They were no good. Not easy to fire people.

You'd pay a price for it, but they were no good. I inherited these people. I didn't put him there. I didn't put Comey there. He was no good. I fired him.

This guy hasn't fired anybody. He never fires. He should have fired every military man that was involved with that Afghan - the Afghanistan horror show. The most embarrassing moment in the history of our country. He didn't fire?

Did you fire anybody? Did you fire anybody that's on the border, that's allowed us to have the worst border in the history of the world? Did anybody get fired for allowing 18 million people, many from prisons, many from mental institutions? Did you fire anybody that allowed our country to be destroyed? Joe, our country is being destroyed as you and I sit up here and waste a lot of time on this debate. This shouldn't be a debate.

He is the worst president. He just said it about me because I said it. But look, he's the worst president in the history of our country. He's destroyed our country. Now, all of a sudden, he's trying to get a little tough on the border. He come out - came out with a nothing deal, and it reduced it a little bit. A little bit, like this much. It's insignificant.

He wants open borders. He wants our country to either be destroyed or he wants to pick up those people as voters. And I don't think - we just can't let it happen. If he wins this election, our country doesn't have a chance. Not even a chance of coming out of this rut. We probably won't have a country left anymore. That's how bad it is. He is the worst in history by far.

TAPPER: Thank you, President Trump. President Biden?

Here’s another:

TAPPER: Former President Trump, despite the efforts that both of you have made, more than 100,000 Americans are dying from overdoses every year, primarily from fentanyl and other opioids. What will you do to help Americans right now in the throes of addiction, who are struggling to get the treatment they need?

TRUMP: To finish up, we now have the largest deficit in the history of our country under this guy, we have the largest deficit with China. He gets paid by China. He's a Manchurian candidate. He gets money from China. So I think he's afraid to deal with him or something.

But do you notice? He never took out my tariffs because we bring in so much money with the tariffs that I imposed on China. He never took them away. He can't because it's too much money. It's tremendous. And we saved our steel industries. And there was more to come, but he hasn't done that.

But he hasn't cut the tariffs because he can't, because it's too much money. But he's got the largest deficit in the history of our country and he's got the worst situation with China. China is going to own us if you keep allowing them to do what they're doing to us as a country. They are killing us as a country, Joe, and you can't let that happen. You're destroying our country.

TAPPER: So, President Trump, you have 67 seconds left. The question was, what are you going to do to help Americans in the throes of addiction right now who are struggling to get the treatment they need?

TRUMP: Jake, we're doing very well at addiction until the COVID came along. We had the two-and-a-half, almost three years of like nobody's ever had before, any country in every way. And then we had to get tough. And it was - the drugs pouring across the border, we're - it started to increase.

We got great equipment. We bought the certain dog. That's the most incredible thing that you've ever seen, the way they can spot it. We did a lot. And we had - we were getting very low numbers. Very, very low numbers.

Then he came along. The numbers - have you seen the numbers now? It's not only the 18 million people that I believe is even low, because the gotaways, they don't even talk about gotaways. But the numbers of - the amount of drugs and human trafficking in women coming across our border, the worst thing l've ever seen at numbers - nobody's ever seen under him because the border is so bad. But the number of drugs coming across our border now is the largest we've ever had by far.

TAPPER: President Trump, thank you. President Biden?

This “debate,” as you’ll recall, sent the press into full-throttle warrior-mode about Biden’s lack of fitness for office, and set off a crisis within the Democratic Party that ended with Biden’s leaving the race, while Donald Trump’s reprehensible (although more “robust”) debate performance was allowed to slide into the purgatory of media inattention. His evasive and lying babbling should have been torn apart sentence by sentence. But the story of his appalling performance never got a chance to “get legs,” because we’re used to all that. The media, over the years, has helped normalize it largely by ignoring it. The more shocking, headline-worthy story was Biden.

This little video encapsulates how the corporate media have normalized Donald Trump’s “debate performance” over the years. Notice how they’ve focused on “zingers” rather than ramblings, lies, and incoherencies. Note also what they provide (still within the category of “Donald Trump’s most memorable moments”) for us to see when they come to the “consequential“ debate with Biden.

via @YouTube

If you actually listened to Trump over the past week—the Full Monty Trump, not the Sound-Byte Trump (which is crazy enough)—you know that unless they’ve performed a brain and personality transplant down there at Mar-a-lago, it’s highly unlikely what we’re going to see tomorrow night is a debate.

Debate is a process that involves formal discourse, discussion, and oral addresses on a particular topic or collection of topics, often with a moderator and an audience. In a debate, arguments are put forward for common opposing viewpoints…[Debates emphasize] logical consistency, factual accuracy, and emotional appeal to an audience. (Wikipedia)

Arguments? Logical consistency? Factual accuracy? They haven’t been deciding factors in televised political debates for a long time—actually, not since Kennedy’s handsome geniality won over Nixon’s sweaty precision in the first televised debate. What happened then is legendary: Kennedy had been well prepared with a set of talking points and was instructed to turn the questions around (nowadays, we call this a “pivot”) in order to them out no matter what the question was. Nixon, on the other hand, was a debate purist who addressed the questions with precision but had no winning sound bites; in addition he had a painful staph infection in his leg, and despite looking drawn and thin and sporting a five-o’clock shadow, refused makeup. Kennedy, who had been out campaigning in an open convertible in the California sun, didn’t need any makeup, and Nixon, not wanting to be bested by Kennedy (and possibly, thinking of makeup as too feminine), said no.

The visual contrast was painful—and powerful. People who heard the debate on the radio thought that Nixon had won. But Don Hewitt knew better. “My God,” he said when the debate ended, “we don’t have to wait for election night. I just produced a television show that elected a president of the United States.”

Since then, what registers most from the debates are the zingers and gaffes, replayed endlessly by the pundits, and trivialities of appearance and manner: Lloyd Bentsen’s squashing of Dan Quayle: “I served with Jack Kennedy. I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you're no Jack Kennedy”; Dukakis’s bloodless response to the question of whether or not he would favor the death penalty if his wife Kitty were raped and murdered (he held to his position, without any display of emotion or ambivalence); Obama’s “You’re likable enough, Hillary” (which arguably cost him the next day’s primary election); Rick Perry’s failure to remember the third government agency he wanted to eliminate (“Oops!”); Reagan’s famous pivot on the issue of his age. (The Republican Party thinks of Reagan as The Great Communicator now, but the first debate had been a disaster: Reagan seemed tired and confused, and there was anxiety among his team that his age was becoming an obstacle. Against all advice, Roger Ailes urged Reagan to go right for it rather than avoid it. And so a line that may well have won Reagan the presidency was prepared: “. . . and I want you to know that I will not make an age an issue in this campaign. I am not going to exploit for political purposes my opponent’s youth and experience.”)

And then, too, there are the commentators’ declarations about who looked confident or nervous—Amy Klobuchar’s quivering bangs branded as a sign of nervousness; Hillary Clinton’s always thorough, careful answers described by Chuck Todd as “overprepared.” For weeks before a debate, commercials prepare viewers to be on the lookout for who will “have their moment” and who will get knocked out of the ring. And then they decide who “won” and who “lost.”

As Lawrence O’Donnell pointed out, it all has little to do with who would best serve us as POTUS, and it can turn for or against a candidate on the whims of reporters. During the second Democratic debate in 2019, no doubt encouraged to have a “moment,” Kamala Harris sharply rebuked Joe Biden for his earlier stand on busing. Invoking her own history as a little girl who stood waiting to be bused across town. Kamala’s “I was that little girl” both disarmed and charmed. It was dramatic, it was unexpected. (What? This gorgeous, impeccably dressed woman was once a  little Black girl?) And it caught Joe off guard. Kamala was rewarded with an initial surge in ratings and funding, and much talk about her “rising star.” But Joe Biden was beloved by many older Democrats, particularly older Blacks, and Kamala was so . . . uh . . . aggressive. It didn’t take long for the image of the Mean Prosecutor viciously “attacking” Uncle Joe to supplant sympathy for the little girl, and for the narrative to get turned against Kamala. Soon the headlines were declaring her campaign unravelling and sinking (demonstrated by sliding poll numbers, mostly from the very white early primary states), and we were told that in addition to various strategic campaign mistakes, she didn’t connect with Black voters.

Now, with an opponent convicted of 34 felony counts, bits of what was criticized as “aggressive” are being produced to show what a great prosecutor Kamala is.

So: it’s not as though debates have ever been the “great test” they’ve been promoted as. That’s just corporate media hype, designed to get big viewer numbers.

But: The fact that the media is advertising and promoting and suggesting strategies and employing all their usual approaches to Game Day about tomorrow’s “debate” is crazy-making. They’ve been normalizing Trump’s lies and bizarre behaviors since he ran against Hillary Clinton. (Finally catching on—a bit late—some journalists are now calling out this normalization, referring to it as “sanewashing”) And now, they’re normalizing a “debate” between a rational person and someone who—whether from “age-related cognitive decline” or narcissistic meltdown—needs psychiatric intervention. Thank you, Mike Barnicle, for calling this out:

The idea that tomorrow night this man is going to go “toe to toe” with an “opposing point of view” is, frankly, starting to feel like media gaslighting.

The above photo, accompanying a podcast on “everything you need to know about the presidential debate” is nothing short of a visual false equivalence, suggesting two equally bellowing, shark-like opponents. I will be very surprised if Kamala loses her cool like this. (I don’t know where the Trump photo comes from, but Kamala’s is from a rally, not a debate.) Trump? I’m not so sure.

Here’s my suggestion about what to be on the lookout for in tomorrow’s debate. It’s a list of characteristics of what medical professionals call “thought disorders.” We don’t need a diagnostic label, though, to recognize how aptly they apply to Donald Trump’s mode of “argument”:

Tangentiality: Replies to questions are off-point or totally irrelevant.

Derailment: A person with derailment talks in chains of only semi-related ideas. Their ideas often fall further and further from the topic of conversation.

Incoherence (word salad): severe lack of speech cohesion at the basic level of syntax and/or semantics within sentences

Illogicality: marked errors in inferential logic

Circumstantiality: People with circumstantiality, also known as circumstantial thinking, or circumstantial speech, often include excessive irrelevant details in their speaking or writing. They maintain their original train of thought but provide a lot of unnecessary details before circling back to their main point.

Perseveration: excessive repetition of words, ideas, or subjects

Self-reference: The patient is liable to refer the subject of conversation back to him/herself.

Call it whatever you like. Diagnose it as “age-related decline” or narcissistic meltdown or mid-stage dementia. Just (I’m talking to you journalists and pundits who assess these “debates”) get your headlines straight. This past week, they should have read: “As an Unhinged Trump Rants, the Media Treats the Upcoming Debate as Normal”

Let’s see how you deal with the event itself.

And I’ll be back “on the other side.”

1. If you have the stomach for it, you can watch it too: If you can stand it:

2. Just FYI and by the way: Trump received about 74 million votes nationally in 2020, compared to 81 million for Joe Biden. Not exactly a “whisper.”