Save The Babies! Save The Cats! Save The Dogs! How, Donald? Give Them Trans-Zapping Handguns?
Trump-Harris Debate Exposed The Maggotty Brains Of The MAGA Madness
Trump looked, at some points, like he hoped he’d get shot again.
The problem is that while his self-image is one of presidential stability, he projects mayhem.
At last night’s debate, those cracks showed.
Trump’s attack lines on Harris were like a toddler with a firehose. Apparently, she has no policies. Or the policies are only “four sentences”. Or they are Biden’s policies. Or they are bad policies.
Or, even - they are Trump’s policies! He claims he was going to send her a MAGA hat.
Which is it already?
Biden, with his 50 years of political baggage, faced scrutiny, particularly over his almost messianic support for Israel and Ukraine. While Harris likely shares these views, Trump struggled to pin her down. He accused the vice president of somehow being “Biden,” but also of “hating Israel,” citing her absence from Netanyahu’s Congressional address. However, Harris’ absence was just basic image-management, given that the Israeli Prime Minister is wanted for crimes in Gaza that include starvation and extermination.
In Trump-world, Harris is a radical liberal: “She has a plan to confiscate everyone's guns.” She simply denied it and said she and her running mate owned guns.
Does Trump think Harris is weak on crime or a monster who mistreated criminals in California? No one knows, because he has no coherent attack line.
Trump called her a Marxist. He tried to call her dad a Marxist - an octogenarian professor emeritus at Stanford University from a heterodox economic tradition.
Trump claimed that Biden "can't stand her” but this flies in the face of every public statement and cutesy phone call between her and the outgoing President.
In fact, by soaking up so much blame for four years, Biden has gifted Harris a run from a powerful position with few bruises.
Trump is instinctively no radical on abortion but has to cobble together a narrative on it to suit his pro-Life base. To offset this weakness in the face of Harris’ straightforward position, he absurdly claimed that babies were being aborted after birth.
ABC News anchor Linsey Davis interceded: “There is no state in this country where it is legal to kill a baby after it’s born.”
The electorate do associate Harris with a broken border policy but she doesn’t come across as an incompetent ideologue who is letting in more than 21 million people. Trump’s reaction? He smeared Haitian migrants: "They're eating the dogs, they're eating the cats, they're eating the pets of the people that live there. That is a shame”.
Not only that, Trump insists, “now she wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison.” Erm, ahem. What? All I could find on Twitter were the images in this article.
Overall, Harris comes across as someone who really wants to win, whereas Trump is more like a man desperately scared of losing.
The underlying rhetorical narratives in this race are unhinged. Is Trump a lying fraudulent rapist who wants to force teenagers to have babies with their uncles, and who military leaders worldwide think is a disgraced pussy? Or is he a peace-loving strongman, protecting America from millions of insane, dog-eating asylum illegal migrants, who strikes fear into his enemies and will stop nuclear Armageddon with a click of his fingers?
Is Kamala Harris a visionary from the future who’s fighting to preserve America’s hard won freedoms, and isn’t afraid to use lethal force and fracking to achieve it? Or a weak, newborn baby-killing, World War III-starting Marxist who doesn’t know what colour she is?
I despise the Democrats and think a new Trump presidency would usher in a modicum of international stabilty. But he remains odd and erratic - and it’s easy to see why voters might believe Harris is the sensible choice.
Both candidates landed blows when trying hard to discredit their opponent - but Harris has far less need to lie.
Both have their spin machines firing on all cylinders. The problem for Trump is that his are unattached to the bearings.
This article first appeared HERE on LBC, working to a tight deadline on the morning of the debate. It is republished on this page with some updates and amendments.