After Joe Biden’s debate debacle, his supporters turned on him. After Donald Trump’s debate debacle, he turned on himself.
When pressed by Kamala Harris for another debate, Trump did something telling. He refused. In an all-caps rant on his social media platform, Trump compared himself to a winning prizefighter who doesn’t need to get back in the ring with the challenger he defeated, diminishing Harris’ call for a second showdown as the desperate plea of a loser.
Only it’s Trump who looks desperate. It’s one thing to dismiss debating when you’re clearly headed for victory, like he was during the primaries earlier this year. That choice was buttressed by political strength. It’s another thing entirely to duck debating when you’re in a close contest, you just embarrassed yourself against your opponent, and you’re making feeble attempts to convince people that they didn’t see what they know they just saw.
Clinging to the rationale he offered last Tuesday night, when he reeled off the lopsided results of unnamed snap “polls” showing people overwhelmingly thought he had won, Trump struggled to project victory in the debate to re-establish the impression of superiority, while his body language said otherwise.
Although he is no more capable of admitting it than he is of accepting his 2020 election loss, Trump knows what happened on that stage last Tuesday as much as everyone who was watching. He knows he was dismembered by a stronger opponent and reduced to an incomprehensible mass of babbling rage. He knows Harris unmasked him in front of the world. He knows her challenge to do it again is her way of saying she could do this all day.
The candidate who depends on a frightened electorate begging for a strongman now finds himself held hostage to his own inadequacy. And it is undermining the entire rationale for his campaign.
In order to get people to agree to throw away democracy for the promise of having one person fix all their problems, they have to be terrified of what will happen without the strongman’s protection. And of course the strongman has to be—strong.
This has always been Trump’s pitch. It’s why he describes America under Biden and Harris as a dystopian hellscape, as he did repeatedly during the debate:
Our country is being lost. We’re a failing nation.
We’re playing with World War III and we have a president that we don’t even know if he’s—where is our president?
We’re a nation that’s in serious decline.
This is the most divisive presidency in the history of our country. There’s never been anything like it. They’re destroying our country.
This dark representation of the country aligns with the specifics he mentions at his rallies, where he portrays America as a place where you can’t go to shopping without being a victim of violent crime, immigrants pose a threat to your safety, abortions occur after birth, and children undergo transgender surgery in school.
To invert the famous words of FDR, he has nothing to offer but fear itself.
When Harris took over for Biden, she began chipping away at this rationale. Perhaps unexpectedly, Harris tapped into a hunger for joy that had been lurking below the surface. When it manifested in an explosion of support for her candidacy, she used it brilliantly to change the atmospherics of the contest.
Trump scrambled to reassert a dour national mood and make the case for misery. But his ugly vision of the country was so at odds with the exuberance generated by the Harris-Walz ticket that it started to feel discordant outside the MAGA rage bubble.
Then came the debate, where Harris unmasked Trump’s personal inadequacies. He didn't want to shake her hand. He couldn’t look at her. He couldn’t assert dominance. Nonverbally he communicated subservience while she communicated control.
He was afraid. And his fear complicated his efforts to portray himself as a savior.
In one of his more absurd assertions, Trump elevated an unfounded racist claim which had been floating around far-right corners of the Internet that Haitian immigrants living legally in Springfield, Ohio are dining on their white neighbor’s pets:
In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs. The people that came in. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating, they’re eating the pets of the people that live there.
In an all too familiar pattern, Trump’s words provoked bomb threats against Haitians living in Springfield, causing schools to be evacuated and government buildings to be shut down. At the same time, they proved almost too easy to mock. “They’re eating the pets” exploded as a social media meme. This remix set to music for the benefit of the Springfield SPCA received hundreds of thousands of views:
This level of mockery is something new—and it’s telling. Nothing deflates a strongman more than mockery. Trump’s play for fear did heighten tensions in Ohio, as he had hoped, but it just as quickly became a joke, and he became a joke along with it.
Fear buttressed by ridicule equals weakness.
And weakness makes the authoritarian—and his campaign—unravel.
The candidate who depends on a frightened electorate begging for a strongman finds himself held hostage to his own inadequacy.
Without fear in the electorate, there is no rationale for Trump’s candidacy. And without the aura of strength, the strongman loses his appeal.
Trump’s problem is he genuinely is not up to the task of being president and he is finally running against someone who knows how to expose him. Then, once exposed, he keeps returning to the source of the indignity. Watch as he re-litigates what happened to him last Tuesday for the duration of the campaign, as if revisiting it will somehow deliver him from failure instead of just reminding people of his ineptitude.
Between a lighter national mood and his high-profile humiliation, Trump is no longer running the campaign he needs as a pretext for a second term.
Gone is the image of the bloodied victim defiantly urging his supporters to fight on following an assassination attempt. Gone is the alpha figure who bullied Joe Biden when they debated. Trump has lost control of the narrative. His campaign was on defense before the debate, but now it’s personal.
He can blame the moderators for challenging some of his more indefensible claims. He can blame ABC for rigging the debate against him. But he cannot reclaim the aura of strength he thought would deliver the White House just a few short months ago, and that has to leave him staring in fear at the prospect of everything slipping away.
In general I love the idea of mocking the ridiculous things Trump says. Mockery is such a great strategy against him! But I’m uncomfortable doing so in the case of dangerous hate speech that is causing real harm. I'm not sure Haitian immigrants find it amusing to hear the blood libel against them set to music *while they are suffering real-world attacks.* Even Springtime for Hitler, years after, didn’t set specific vitriol against Jews to music (although there was plenty other mockery).
As Anat Shenker-Osorio says: “I know it feels like all fun and games with the eat dogs comment. That it is so obviously ridiculous that repeating it exposes how heinous Trump is and thus moves voters away from him. But there's no evidence to support this claim, and plenty refuting it. 🧵”
https://x.com/anatosaurus/status/1834301447930085636