It might have lacked the drama of Muhammad Ali’s two greatest fights, the Rumble in the Jungle and the Thrilla in Manila, but few would deny that Kamala Harris floated like a butterfly and stung like a bee.
Even the Fox news hosts had to begrudgingly admit that Harris smoked Donald Trump on stage in the presidential debate in Philadelphia on Tuesday night.
Harris glittered all the more for having been grossly underestimated by Trump who had called her “low IQ”, “dumb” and “lacking the mental capacity” to debate him.
The former Fox, now CNN, host Chris Wallace summed it up well: “Tonight was a shutout on almost every subject I can think of. Trump looked angry, scowling and old.”
He did win one contest – for the number of lies told. According to CNN’s fact checker Daniel Dale, Trump lied 33 times, while Harris lied once.
But mostly Harris beamed with a positivity, her most telling line coming near the end when she said: “Clearly, I am not Joe Biden, and I am certainly not Donald Trump. And what I do offer is a new generation of leadership for our country.”
Josh Marshall, editor of the publication Talking Points Memo noted that it was obvious that the cantankerous Trump was no longer able to maintain his focus or control his anger – “telltale signs of mental decline.”
Insanity
Trump’s ranting crossed into insanity when he claimed that illegal immigrants are eating people’s pets in the town of Springfield, Ohio.
“They’re eating the dogs, the people that came in, they’re eating the cats,” Trump said. “They’re eating the pets of the people that live there, and this is what’s happening in our country, and it’s a shame.”
Trump was fact-checked by the moderator, ABC’s David Muir, who pointed out that the bizarre claim had been debunked, but that it landed up on a national debate stage says a lot about the weakness of Trump’s message in the final weeks of this election campaign.
From the moment that he descended the escalator at Trump Tower in 2015 to announce he was running for president, Trump has pushed the notion that the United States is a broken, failing nation, which he is uniquely qualified to fix.
This appeals to religious types familiar with the narrative of a saviour who is coming to deliver them from an imperfect, fallen world. But it doesn’t work as a campaign strategy when reality does not match the lurid images of “American carnage” that he is promoting.
None of the hot-button issues Trump thought he was going to run on are helping him: inflation is nearly back under two percent, violent crime is dramatically down, and even border crossings have fallen to about where they were when he left office in 2021.
And as was clear from his closing statement on the debate stage, which was exclusively an attack on Harris and the Biden administration, Trump has no plan to fix anything.
Trump is in fact resorting to the oldest playbook – scapegoating “illegals” as mentally insane and dangerous criminals, a theme that he repeatedly and repetitively returned to at the debate.
Trump has sworn to arrest and deport between 15 and 20 million immigrants as the first order of business if he is re-elected, and his dead-eyed aide Stephen Miller is chafing at the bit to start building concentration camps.
Just this weekend, Trump promised that the greatest mass arrests in US history would be a “bloody story”. He also threatened to jail his political adversaries, including late-night comedians, for making fun of him.
The Trump campaign has been trying to fan hysteria and panic over violent migrants and fake videos of alleged Venezuelan gangs taking over apartment blocks in Colorado have circulated on social media.
Maga overdrive
But – and here’s where the pet-eating comes in – days before the debate, Maga social media went into overdrive at the startling tale of an “illegal” Haitian immigrant in Springfield who, according to a story that first appeared on Facebook, stole a neighbour’s cat and ate it – raw.
The person who committed this rank act, it was claimed, was one of thousands flown into the US by the Biden-Harris administration. They were now eating not only the local dogs and cats, but ducks and geese from the ponds. Even eagles.
Of course, there was no truth in any of this, but it gained traction and millions of views on Monday when Trump’s running mate, J D Vance, posted a video of the alleged cat-eater and reported as fact that migrants were abducting pets and “causing chaos” in the town.
Elon Musk, the immigrant from South Africa who has been obsessively posting fake anti-immigrant stories, joined in, retweeting the false claim that 20,000 “non-citizens” were destroying the town and eating people’s pets. He commented: “Vote for Kamala if you want this to happen in your neighbourhood.”
Musk’s shrine to free speech proved once again that it is a sewer for the foulest sludge emanating from the rectum of society, hosting multiple posts that asserted things like “the government dumped thousands of retarded black cannibals from Haiti into Springfield”.
The lie had travelled halfway around the world before the Springfield chief of police had time to put his boots on. The police department said there had been no credible reports of immigrants harming people’s pets and expressed regret that people were spreading hatred and fear.
It turned out there was a cat eater, but she was from another town in Ohio and was actually a US citizen born in the country, who probably had mental problems.
The Haitians in Springfield are there legally and the CEO of a local factory that employs some, compared them favourably to the locals: “I wish I had 30 more,” he told Public Broadcasting’s Newsnight. “Our Haitians come to work every day. They don’t have a drug problem. They’ll stay at their machine. There’s a stark difference from what we are used to.”
Even after it was shown to be rubbish, Vance continued to push the story, claiming he had “received many inquiries from actual residents of Springfield who’ve said their neighbours’ pets or local wildlife were abducted by Haitian migrants.”
At the debate, Trump fell victim to his own practice of surrounding himself with an echo chamber of sycophants and conspiracy theorists who are as deranged and detached from reality as he is. If you don’t believe me, google Laura Loomer, who flew to the debate from Mara Lago with Trump.
Right-winger Erick Erickson blamed the “stupid MFers” around the former president for “lying so Trump picks it up and says stupid shit”.
Undeterred Republicans on social media have trumpeted: “Save the animals. Vote Donald Trump” which is funny, because the people that animals should most fear are in Trump’s circle.
Robert F Kennedy Jr, the former third-party candidate who recently endorsed Trump, has denied claims by a vet that a large animal on a grill that he was holding in a photograph was a barbecued dog. Instead, he is claiming that it was a goat.
Kennedy also dumped a dead bear cub in Central Park to make it look like it had died in a bicycle accident, and chain-sawed the head off a dead whale he found on the beach, fastening it to his minivan’s roof with a bungee cord.
It is only a few months since one of the favourites to be Trump’s running mate, South Dakota Governor Kirsti Noem, bragged in a memoir that she had shot out the brains of the family’s pet wirehaired pointer, Cricket, after it embarrassed her by misbehaving in front of important guests during a pheasant hunt.
This proved too much even for the notoriously dog-phobic Trump, who must have discovered that there are more than 90 million pet dogs in the US, and they are generally held in higher regard than politicians.
Noem was dropped from the list of potentials, only to be replaced by Vance, who quickly alienated another huge animal-loving demographic – the country’s 45 million cat owners.
Smears and stereotypes
A tape surfaced of Vance talking with TV host Tucker Carlson and complaining that the country was being run by “childless cat ladies”.
The misogynistic slur has become a battle cry in the election and mega-star Taylor Swift, who endorsed Harris in a message to her 284-million Instagram followers minutes after the debate, called herself a “childless cat lady” alongside a picture of her holding her cat.
There were many people on Tuesday night who were hoping that this must surely mark the end for Donald Trump, that there could be no clearer indication that the man is not fit.
But we’ve been here before, many times.
We haven’t seen any opinion polls post the debate yet, but it is terrifying to think that even after all the madness and destruction and everything that has gone down during the past nine years, Harris is only fractionally ahead.
Trump’s support base has remained solid at about 45 or 46% for a long time, and Harris and the Democrats still have work to do to reach the last small number of persuadables.
Once again, the race will come down to a tiny number of votes in about five to seven states, though the half a million defamed Haitians in newly competitive Florida, many of them voters, might have a view on how to counter the smears and racial stereotypes that Maga subjected them to this week. DM