It’s been a week since the debate. With a little distance I can finally process the spectacle of it all.
Harris was nothing less than brilliant. All along, I have been yelling from the rooftop that the way to debate The Don was to avoid engaging his craziness and his attacks, and treat him like the fool that he is; in essence, to shrink him; because the smaller he feels, the crazier he gets. Humiliation is his kryptonite; it leads to rage and psychic disintegration. Harris delivered a masterclass in reducing a bloviating bully to size.
As she has said often on the campaign trail: “She knows Donald Trump’s type.”
To Harris, the Don wasn’t some menacing force of male toxicity to fear, but a vacuous scam artist. His infamous comment that he “could shoot someone on 5th Ave and wouldn’t lose any voters” tells us all we need to know about him. His delusions of grandeur make him feel untouchable, unlike anyone else. Harris’s experience as a prosecutor has brought her face-to-face with the likes of The Don and allows her to see right through him. She sees him for the small, two-bit thug he is and in the debate treated him that way. She knew if she baited him he would unravel and incriminate himself, showing his truly unhinged, vacuous self to the American people. She did it so smoothly and with such aplomb; it must have felt that she was taking candy from a baby.
From the moment she appeared on the stage she had a plan. She walked right up to him, put her hand out and right then she took the power from him. I imagine him thinking: “Shit, that evil Black bitch woman touched me and I don’t have anything to wash it off with.” It was all downhill from there as if the touching of his hand infiltrated his brain and he couldn’t get it out, sort of like RFK Jr’s brain worm.
The Don was flustered. His response to her was to “have fun.” She sure did, and at his expense. If you turned off the sound it was clear that only one person was having fun, and it wasn’t the Orange man. The contrast between her smiling, warm and engaging demeanor with his alternating cry baby, angry mugshot countenance was so stark. His disdain for her was so overwhelming that he did not look at her once during the entire debate. Perhaps he was scared that if he looked at her that just the meeting of their eyes would increase her power over him, a kind of voodoo.
Kamala struck with the surgical precision of a drone. I found myself thinking about how Muhammed Ali used to take down his opponents by jabbing at their eyes until they could barely see. She dismantled him. It was a masterclass.
Let’s go through my favorite moments.
The moment when it really went south for The Don was when she was able to pivot from a question about immigration (supposedly her weakness and The Don’s wheelhouse.) She invited the American people to go to one of The Don’s rallies and said: “people start leaving his rallies early out of exhaustion and boredom.” When she said that I looked at a friend and said “he’s going to unravel.” Nothing gets to him like the size of his rallies, That is where he feels most “bigly” (remember that oldie but goody?) Her comment deflated him and he could not resist going for the bait. Like a toddler having a tantrum he blurted: “People don’t go to her rallies. There’s no reason to go, she pays people to attend” adding, “People don’t leave my rallies. We have the biggest rallies, the most incredible rallies in the history of politics.” He was oozing with rage. I honestly believe that there was a moment he felt like leaving his place on the stage to strangle her. Here was one of those nasty awful Black women puncturing his balloon, making him feel very small in front of 67 million people. In his misogynist racist world this was the slave calling out the master.
On foreign policy she looked him straight in the eye and hit’em between the eyes mocking his “love letters to Kim Jong-un. She accused him of being easily manipulated by foreign leaders through “flattery and favors” and why “so many military leaders who you have worked with have told me you are a disgrace.” She told him that “world leaders were laughing at him” and then hit him with the knockout punch when she said Vladimir Putin would “eat him for lunch.” When she said that, I found myself thinking about his incoherent comments about Hannibal Lecter and thought let’s not forget to add the fava beans and a good chianti to go with lunch.
His response to a question about abortion was filled with lies and completely unhinged, once again insisting that Harris supports killing babies after they are born. He championed the Supreme Court decision regarding overturning Roe and spun some fantasy that most Americans were in agreement with that decision. Harris’s response to him was passionate, drawing on heart wrenching stories of women who suffered because of the decision. Let’s not forget The Don’s comment that he was “leading on fertilization.” Don the crop grower? Let’s just say she ate his crops for lunch.
She looked him in the eye and said that he was “fired by 81 million people” and was clearly “having a hard time processing that,” intimating that he might benefit from some trauma focused therapy.
She took The Don apart like someone dismantling a Tinker Toy project until there was no structure left. And just when you thought he was dead in the water, he brought out the big guns and started ranting and raving about immigrants.
“They are taking over the towns,” he said. “They’re taking over buildings. They’re going in violently. These are the people that she and Biden let into our country. And they’re destroying our country. They are dangerous. They’re at the highest level of criminality, and we have to get them out. We have to get them out fast.”
And then the piece de resistance: “They’re eating the dogs,” he said, referring to Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio — a particularly heinous conspiracy theory that began on social media and was spread by his running mate, JD Vance. “The people that came in, they’re eating the cats. They’re eating — they’re eating the pets of the people that live there.”
When confronted by one of the moderators with a fact check that the county manager of Springfield had debunked this claim as untrue, he responded that he had seen it on TV. Certainly makes sense given that he came to national prominence as a reality TV host. Do I need to say how pathetic and very scary that is?
Between Kristen Noem killing her dog, RFK Jr. beheading a whale and Vance denigrating “Cat Ladies” the Republicans are writing a new version of the George Orwell classic “Animal Farm,” Sounds like a dark comedy, but if you recall, the theme of the book is about totalitarianism. In the new version, The Don and his cronies are not going for your pets, they are coming for us. Hopefully, some of the 67 million viewers who were undecided at the time of the debate realized that there was only one candidate on the stage that was presidential and it wasn’t the Orange man.
The Grand Offal Party 