The day before Kamala Harris cleaned Donald Trump’s clock, I wrote a pre-debate post debate analysis that “looked back” on this:
Kamala Harris mocked Trump, pushed back and called him out for being weird—and dangerous. Without an audience to cheer him on, Trump’s insults just sounded stupid. When asked to detail policy proposals, he couldn’t, just as he couldn’t articulate his position on child care at that “economic policy” speech last week.
Trump attacked Kamala Harris over Afghanistan, the border, energy and the economy, but his attacks fell flat as the Vice President calmly and cooly rose above them. Donald Trump revealed his glass jaw, while Kamala Harris had more than one knockout punch.
What I couldn’t predict was that Donald Trump would talk about immigrants eating cats and dogs in Ohio. Otherwise, the last line of my earlier post seems pretty prescient:
Trump showed us a lunatic during the debate, and Kamala Harris showed us a president.
I enjoy reading Axios AM for breaking political news and lively writing like this:
He didn't just nibble at the bait. He crushed it like a starving, roaring river salmon. He was on a wild run the rest of the debate.
While we wait for Donald Trump to fire his campaign managers (I’ll go out on a limb and predict that), we can expect more stories like this one, from the indispensable Larry Sabato by way of the equally indispensable
. (Have you signed up yet for Political Wire? I check it five times a day):“Swing state polls show an incredibly close race in our 7 Toss-up presidential states right now.”
“Final polling did generally overstate Democrats in both the 2016 and 2020 elections in these states, with Wisconsin standing out. Keep that in mind as polling shows Kamala Harris holding up a little bit better in the Badger State than elsewhere.”
“If polls are understating Donald Trump again, he of course is in a great position to win given how competitive he already is in the core swing states. But there are good reasons to believe that he is not being understated this time.”
Yes, but…
There are also good reasons to believe what we saw on Tuesday night. As Nancy Pelosi put it, (again, courtesy of Political Wire):
“He is like one of those big balloons when you stick a pin in and it swirls around the room until it comes down to nothing.”
This morning, Joe Scarborough was bemoaning the fact that even if Kamala Harris wins, probably 81 million people will have looked at a dictator wannabe who only cares about himself and said, “that’s our guy!” Maybe—but it’s also true that while some of us think politics and elections matter, and reflect the deeply held values and beliefs we want to share with our fellow citizens, others are like Donald Trump.
I quote Maggie Haberman about as often as I quote Robert Kennedy:
Mr. Trump has treated his own words as disposable commodities, intended for single use, and not necessarily indicative of any deeply held beliefs. And his tendency to pile phrases on top of one another has often worked to his benefit, amusing or engaging his supporters — sometimes spurring threats and even violence — while distracting, enraging or just plain disorienting his critics and adversaries.
To Trump, and to his followers, politics is a clown show, a game, something you tune in and out of on TV. A vote for Trump may not necessarily be an endorsement of his “views,” (which he doesn’t have, see above) but an affirmation as fleeting as a “like” on social media. Or a laugh at a punchline.
I’ll hold on to a ripple of hope and return to my often-expressed view here that we don’t know how many Trump voters will go back to being what they were before MAGA—non-voters. Who can inherit his following? J.D. Vance? Tucker Carlson? Victor Orban?
I won’t go so far as to predict a new political market in dictator trades, but I will repeat what you’ve been hearing from everyone, me included. Seven states (plus part of Nebraska) matter in this election and Kamala Harris is in good shape in the three that matter most—Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin—almost as well in Nevada and Arizona, and is putting North Carolina and Georgia in play.
Fifty-one million people saw the Biden/Trump debate, but 67 million saw this one. As Peter Baker saw the debate in the New York Times,
Donald J. Trump’s America is a grim place, a nation awash in marauding immigrants stealing American jobs and eating American cats and dogs, a country devastated economically, humiliated internationally and perched on the cliff’s edge of an apocalyptic World War III.
Kamala Harris’s America is a weary but hopeful place, a nation fed up with the chaos of the Trump years and sick of all the drama and divisiveness, a country embarrassed by a crooked stuck-in-the-past former president facing prison time and eager for a new generation of leadership.
Whose vision will prevail? I don’t think you have to be Nostradamus to see that one.
Make your own predictions in the comments.