So often Tuesday night it looked as if Kamala Harris were debating Joe Biden. You’d never have thought the dimming and diminished man she was facing had been president, or had the capabilities to be president again. He was an angry old scrooge, confused, grimacing, gesticulating, hunting for that old sarcastic touch he never found. His Mussolini lips had gone from crossbow to limp sling. He was out of air, out of place, and out of his depth.
Of course we’d been used to this from Donald Trump for years. The man has been a blur of bluster and brutality ever since he descended into the Hades of his own making at Trump Tower in 2015 to announce his neoconfederacy’s assault on America. Back then, two days after his 69th birthday, he was still a sprightly bully you could mock at your own risk, as we smug and blind believers in fairytale democracy all did.
His debilities and narcissism, his cruelties and Central-Park-Five vigilantism had defined him even in his prime when the less fortunate of us who lived in New York endured his wilding rants on late-night TV and his mug so often pollute the front page of the New York Post. That was not an easy thing to do in Rupert Murdoch’s already toxic tabloid. But Trump was made for American exceptionalism.
If by 2015 age had made a white whale of him, with barnacles for charm if you were to compare him to Ronald Reagan (who took the White House at the same age), Trump could still depend on a model wife, his nepotist daughter-in-waiting and his years as The Apprentice’s biggest fabrication to give him the kind of lift Photoshop couldn’t. He could also depend on a servile press still laughing along, as if the Trump candidacy were an extended Letterman appearance. Really, we were all in on it. We deserved him.
Trump spent the next four years turning this country into something O’Henry used to make fun of when he wrote of cabbages, kings and bananas in Central America, and the four years after that rewriting history, foremost his own, as if he were the real inheritor of the Donation of Constantine.
But Americans are prone to dementia when it comes to recalling political history older than SnapChat. With Biden next to him a few weeks ago it had been more difficult to see how far Trump had degenerated to something like American carnage. As one analyst had it when the two relics debated, Biden turned in the worst performance ever. Trump turned in the second-worst performance ever.
On Tuesday, Trump finally had that honor all to himself. He was so proud of it that he did what candidates never do after debates. After Harris left him in the cold like a cat hissing in an Atlantic City alley, he went to the spin room to gain back a little warmth from all those flashing bulbs and add a chapter to his donation we’ll come to know as the Protocol of the Elder of Mara.
This isn’t to say Kamala Harris was that good. For all her attempted wit and jabs and chin tricks she was no Adlai Stevenson. She was no Shirley Chisholm, for that matter, and both lost more decisively than Clinton did in Trump’s first clobber. Harris showed she could stand up to Trump and force him to stand down, as someone should have done, say, when he was 6. But she has yet to show she can stand up for herself, as in stand up for a four-year record that is barely less accomplished than LBJ’s better years (and LBJ had a supermajority of Congress to get his program through).
Afghanistan? The final days were a debacle but nothing like the murderous, pointless debacle of America’s longest war, which Biden alone finally had the courage to end. It’s a little pathetic and typically arrogant of imperious Americans to find tears and agony for 13 dead when 70,000 civilians were killed from the time George W. Bush invaded.
That two-year inflation blip? Devastating. Admit it. But stop making it look like an exclusively American creation. The post-Covid Biden splurge contributed a couple of points. Every state, especially DeSantis’s Florida, basked in the splurge to cover up what would otherwise have been deficits. But inflation was a global phenomenon that primarily radiated from Russian aggression and Saudi manipulation of oil prices. If it’s splurges we’re worried about, the Trump years’ ballooning of debt and deficits should be catching voters’ eyes. So should Biden’s. Instead, Trump is peddling schemes to bribe voters with more reckless tax cuts and run the country as if it were one of his bankruptcy-begging properties.
But we’re getting into policy details, and that’s the last thing Harris wants. She followed a script Tuesday. It was a solid, made-for-TV script. It wasn’t a knock-out. Trump lost from own goals, which his flagellant faithful always forgive him. If you’re a Harris fan you probably shouldn’t raise your hopes even with that Swift endorsement. Carter and Reagan were supposedly neck-and-neck until the final weekend. Carter, who could still run the country from Hospice better than Trump, lost by 10 points. Clinton was ahead in nine out of 10 polls with an average lead of 4 points over Trump and a bigger lead in October 2016. John Kerry and Michael Dukakis had huge leads in their fleeting summers, nothing like the wish-upon-a-star margin Harris is carrying. They lost.
It’s not just the electoral college. It’s an electorate inebriated on phony nostalgia, desperate for a nonexistent fantasy that Trump can nevertheless sell like bibles and steaks. He should be 30 points down, even if Biden was still in the race. Instead, he’s about to return from his Elba, and you know how that went. America’s Waterloo is still ahead.
Pierre Tristam is the editor of FlaglerLive. A version of this piece airs on WNZF.
