The Debate

Poor Don.​ He thought it would be an easy golf-cart ride back to the White House, rolling over the recumbent body of Sleepy Joe. Then the Dems pulled a switcheroo and suddenly he was faced with a middle-of-the-roader without much of a damaging paper trail, whose demeanour was the unlikely combination of tough prosecutor and warm human. Worse, she was a woman. And even worse, a woman of colour, like those vengeful district attorneys burning him at the stake in the courts of New York and Georgia, or the journalists who laughed when he said he was the greatest president for Blacks since Lincoln.

Don has always been a Las Vegas kinda guy, with his showgirls and gold-plated toilets, a long-running joke in New York high society, and his rhetorical style is modelled on the Rat Pack’s favourite comedian, another Don – Rickles, the king of insults. He’s been pretty good at it: ‘Little Marco Rubio’, ‘Low Energy Jeb Bush’, ‘Birdbrain Nikki Haley’ doomed them in the primaries. But Kamala Harris had him flummoxed. He tried recycling some of the old Hillary Clinton epithets – ‘Crooked Kamala’, ‘Lyin’ Kamala’ – but they didn’t stick, since Harris is attached to no known scandals. He tried the old ‘Barack HUSSEIN Obama’ un-American birther line, deliberately mispronouncing her name at his rallies and spelling it ‘Kamabla’ – rather oblique as a joke – on his incessant Truth Social posts. He called her a Marxist, ‘Comrade Kamala’, and posted AI-generated images of her in a Red Army uniform, but Harris is an establishment Democratic centrist who has never been an icon of the progressive left like Elizabeth Warren or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. ‘Dumb as a rock’ and ‘low IQ’ – he may be the last person on earth who mentions IQ – had no traction, considering that the stars of MAGA include the congresswomen Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene, with their ‘gazpacho police’ and California wildfires started by Rothschild space lasers. In the end he was reduced to blowjob jokes on his dismal social media platform.

The Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, when Biden was still in the race, had been his triumph. He had – it is astonishing – completely purged the party. Almost no Republican who was prominent fifteen years ago showed up, nor did his own former vice president or most of the former members of his cabinet. Instead they had aged wrestlers, obscure rockers, Z-list actors, a star of the ‘adult’ website OnlyFans and the Twitterati faction of Congress addressing the flocks of red-crested warblers in their MAGA caps. Dizzying for those of us who grew up in the Cold War, this was a Republican Party that was now the enemy of the FBI, the CIA, Nato, the Department of Education and Walt Disney, and was the ally of Russia.

Don was so confident of his party’s eternal rule that he allowed Don Jr and Tucker Carlson to persuade him to anoint, without any vetting, a successor who would embody ‘MAGA: The Next Generation’. JD Vance, formerly known as James Donald Bowman, James David Hamel and J.D. Vance, now strangely rebranded without the stops, is a self-styled ‘hillbilly’ whose backwoods was Middletown, Ohio, an industrial suburb of Cincinnati (pop. 50,987), where he went from poverty to Yale Law School. He wrote a bestselling book excoriating poor white people for being lazy and not as self-motivated as himself, then became the disciple of the über-libertarian billionaire Peter Thiel, who believes that ‘freedom and democracy’ are not ‘compatible’, that it was a mistake for women to be given the right to vote, and that the future lies in colonies in space and on the oceans, free from government repression. Thiel hired Vance for a few years as a venture capitalist in Silicon Valley, then gave him $15 million to run for the Senate in Ohio.

Vance turned out to be the first vice-presidential pick with an immediate ‘unfavourable’ rating in the polls – even the matchless Sarah Palin had her fans – for it was soon discovered that JD held some unusual opinions. People who do not have children are ‘sociopaths’. ‘Our country is basically run by childless Democrats who are miserable in their own lives and want to make the rest of the country miserable too.’ The childless should not be allowed to teach in schools. (Although a recent convert to Catholicism, he seemed to have forgotten the nuns.) And he unpolitically characterised those sociopaths as ‘childless cat ladies’, swiftly alienating tens of millions of cat lovers, as well as Taylor Swift.

Vance said he doesn’t ‘really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another’. Attacked by white supremacists for being married to an Indian (and having a son named Vivek), he said: ‘Obviously, she’s not a white person … but I just, I love Usha. She’s such a good mom.’ (Usha Vance was, until a few weeks before the campaign, a corporate litigator.) He appears to wear eyeliner. A totally false story that the young JD had a predilection for sex with his couch went viral because it didn’t seem all that unlikely.

In contrast, Harris made a brilliant selection: Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota, who was largely unknown nationally and is the type of Midwestern progressive populist that American politics hasn’t seen in decades. He is straight out of a 1950s sitcom as All-American Dad: beloved teacher, coach who took the losing high school football team to the state championship, long-term military man, hunter and fisherman, star of YouTube videos where he fixes his car or talks about the importance of cleaning out the gutters on your house. Yet he has also been perhaps the most progressive governor in the country: strong supporter of unions, veterans, LGBTQ and reproductive rights, provider of free breakfasts and lunches to schoolchildren and free university tuition for poor students. Most of all, he is the plainest plain speaker on a presidential ticket since Harry Truman. It took just two remarks to launch him out of obscurity. After months of the Democrats treating Trump as a Godzilla who will trample democracy, Walz deflated Trump and Vance in a single sentence: ‘These guys are weird as hell.’ (Trump responded: ‘They’re the weird ones! Nobody’s ever called me weird.’ He later clarified, ‘I think we’re extremely normal people,’ and suggested that Walz was talking about Vance, not him.) And, in the most perfect defence of the right to abortion, Walz said that in the Midwest ‘we respect our neighbours and the personal choices they make … we’ve got a golden rule: mind your own damn business.’

The Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade has proven to be immensely unpopular, and the Republican convention was notable for the near total absence of the word ‘abortion’. Gay marriage, the major threat to American values in George W. Bush’s campaigns, turned out not to destroy the country after all when Obama enacted it. Now the enemy within is transgender people. According to Trump, ‘You’re a parent and your son leaves the house and you say, “Jimmy, I love you so much. Go have a good day in school.” And your son comes back with a brutal operation!’ (It’s a MAGA meme that those childless liberal teachers are forcibly transitioning our kids at school.) This threat has now spread beyond the actually transgendered. The theocrat and Thiel disciple Senator Josh Hawley says that ‘no menace to this nation is greater than the collapse of American manhood.’ Tucker Carlson recommends that men tan their testicles, as ‘bromeopathy’. Jesse Watters, who replaced Carlson as the most popular anchor on Fox News, notes: ‘I heard the scientists say the other day that when a man votes for a woman, he actually transitions into a woman.’ (Watters also attacked Walz as unmanly for drinking a milkshake with a straw at the Minnesota State Fair. The problem, he made clear, was the straw, not the milkshake.)

At the presidential debate – the first time Trump and Harris had ever met, as he refused to attend Biden’s inauguration – Trump was hunched over and permanently fixed in his famous scowl (modelled, he has said, on Winston Churchill). He was, once again, the Messenger of Doom: ‘Our country is being lost, we’re a failing nation.’ The prisons of the world are empty because they have sent all the criminals across our border. Doctors in blue states are performing abortions after the baby is born. World War Three is imminent. ‘People can’t go out and buy cereal or bacon or eggs or anything else. The people of our country are absolutely dying.’ And, as usual, there were the delusions of grandeur. Had he been president, Russia would never have invaded Ukraine, Hamas would never have attacked Israel, but he can end both wars overnight. He even provided a character reference: ‘Viktor Orbán … said the most respected, most feared person is Donald Trump.’

Trump seemed to think he was still running against Biden. He made Sleepy Joe jokes, claimed that Biden had personally received millions from the wife of the mayor of Moscow and, almost inevitably, mentioned the hapless Hunter Biden. Harris had to remind him that he was running against her. She feigned astonishment at some of his wackier comments, and could barely suppress her glee when Trump couldn’t help himself and went ballistic as she pushed his buttons: his rallies are boring, he got a lot of money from his father and mainly lost it, hundreds of Republican former officials and even Dick Cheney support her. She almost laughed when Trump claimed that Biden ‘hates’ her and that she, with a Jewish husband, ‘hates’ Israel.

And of course Trump had to bring up the cats. Vance’s cat lady crack wasn’t going away, so the Republicans had demonstrated their cat-loving credentials by creating the completely false story that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were stealing cats off the front porches of real Americans and eating them. This led Senator Ted Cruz and countless Russian bots to post cute kitten pictures with captions like ‘Don’t let the immigrants eat me!’ When the debate moderator pointed out that the story was untrue, Trump shrugged and said he had seen it on TV.

The actual issues being discussed at presidential debates hardly ever matter. (In the famous Nixon-Kennedy debate, the main question was the fate of the islands of Quemoy and Matsu.) What matters is the image. Trump was grumpy and sometimes angry, rambling and unfocused and, in the absence of an even more elderly Biden, just plain old. Harris was calm and prosecutorial, and had anticipated all the questions. She has wisely avoided Hillary Clinton’s continual rhetoric about breaking the glass ceiling, making it seem merely normal to have an intelligent and qualified woman of colour as president.

Above all, Harris seemed sincere. All winning presidential candidates, regardless of ideology or policy, have been perceived – rightly or wrongly – as believing what they say: Biden, Trump, Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Reagan, Carter. The losers – Hillary Clinton, Romney, Kerry – were seen as repeating whatever they thought the voters wanted to hear. (John McCain, Trump’s nemesis, was a special case, and may prove exemplary for Trump. A sincere guy, now a Republican saint, he appeared to be in poor health and possibly incapable of completing his term. The spectre of Sarah Palin as president made the choice of Obama, the ‘guy with the funny name’, less risky. Vance may well be Trump’s Palin.)

At the time of writing, the polls indicate the race is in a dead heat. It seems incredible that almost half the country still supports Trump, despite the felony convictions, the porn stars, the blatant graft, the endless lies, the allegations of assault and rape, the 6 January insurrection, the continuing refusal to accept his defeat in 2020, the classified documents in his bathroom at Mar-a-Lago, the vows to prosecute all his many enemies, including journalists, and to fire everyone in the government bureaucracy who is not loyal to him, the claims to dictatorial power. Even more incredible is that there is a slice of the voting population that is still ‘undecided’. Republican legislatures in various states have already set in motion procedures to keep people from voting and to deny the results if Trump loses. A Harris victory may well be dependent on a landslide, and that is unlikely to happen.

13 September