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Trump at the debate: “But just answer one question. Who built the cages? A big ask of that, who built the cages?” 

“When you don’t give a fuck about accuracy it really opens up new avenues,” said me in an involuntary outburst of admiration for Trump’s disregard of reality.   

I was looking forward to the last debate but with some trepidation. Former Vice-President Biden is leading in the polls and I, in the words of a neighbor, “just want to get this thing over.” I want President Trump to lose and that means Biden has to win and the longer this almost interminable election goes on the more chances for Biden to lose. In the last debate, Trump came out yelling, talking over both Biden and Chris Wallace, and the Debate Committee adjusted for that by having only the person with a live mic being the person to whom the question was asked. It worked well but, more importantly, President Trump had been told, by his election team – who even knew he had an election team? – to act more Presidential and less Alpha Bully.

I thought that would be hard for Donald Trump but I thought he would start off being a conventional politician and it would fade during the hour and a half allowing the Alpha Bully out. As a conventional politician, Donald Trump is very effective. He brought up that the child-separation policy didn’t start with him, he got it from Obama, for example. What Trump is not good at is nuance and I think that works to his advantage. The certainty, the black and whiteness of his positions, appeals to much of his base. The problem is that the truth is often nuanced and messy. Yeah, it’s true that President Trump didn’t start the Separating Kids From Their Parents Program, Bush started it and Obama continued it but the details are important. Both Bush and Obama used it only in special cases and President Trump took that abhorrent program and industrialized it. But even more telling, Bush and Obama tried to hide the program – out of shame, I think – while President Trump’s Administration started off bragging about it.

Joe Biden is the consummate politician, the consummate insider and he is running this campaign as a pitch for a return to normalcy. Sure, he is pitching lots of changes, including and especially in the area of Global Climate Change, he promises to make a huge investment in fighting Climate Change. But Biden’s real pitch is competency (and the end of constant drama). He kept returning to the Trump Administration’s inept handling of the Covide epidemic with different themes but the punchline was pretty much always a variation on “220,000 Americans dead”. Biden’s biggest weakness, in my opinion, is that he has been doing this for forty some-odd years and all his answers sound canned. But, when he runs out of canned answers and speaks from the heart, he can be very effective.

As an aside, I’ve watched various bits from Trump’s rallies and it always impresses me how much he interacts with the audience. He is their friend and they are having a good time together, not just with a group of down status white men and women but with a room full of rich Jews at an American Jewish Congress meeting. Part of that charm is his expressive mouth which works better in person than in a close-up on TV. End aside.

As the evening wore on, Trump’s Alpha Bully didn’t show up, Donald Trump the huckster did. As Trump got nervous, or tired, or both, started future faking, promising us that the vaccine would be coming before Election Day, that there was a better Health Care Program coming in just two weeks. As the debate went on, Donald Trump became increasingly strident and he slipped into full Capitan Quig and the Strawberries Mode, saying: “Joe got three and a half million dollars from Russia. And it came through Putin because he was very friendly with the former mayor of Moscow and it was the mayor of Moscow’s wife. He got three and a half million dollars. Your family got three and a half million dollars…nobody tougher than me on Russia…while he was selling pillows and sheets — I sold tank busters to Ukraine…There has been nobody tougher on Russia than Donald Trump…he tried to hurt Social Security years ago, years ago. Go back and look at the records…He tried to hurt Social Security…”

Trump’s rants bring up a bigger problem, however, the political system has no way to deal with blatant lies like “your family got three and a half million dollars”, the legal system is set up to deal with lies but not the political system. All Biden can do is deny it, but that is usually pretty weak sauce. “Biden denies his family got three and a half million dollars” almost reinforces the accusation. In a debate, it seems, the press is more interested in promoting discord than giving us a sense of the candidates. The week before last, I watched Biden’s Town Hall – and some of Trump’s – and that format is much better for actually getting information out. But that is academic now, the debates are over, and, in ten days, so will this election will be over too. Then the country can start on all the legal battles that are sure to come.

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