Beware the prosecutor who smiles. Be wary of the cornered sewer rat who feels threatened.
That sums up the contentious presidential debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former president and convicted felon Donald Trump in Philadelphia Tuesday night. At every turn, she brilliantly laid out bait that he couldn’t resist. By the end of the night, he was the cornered sewer rat – and he knew it. His closing speech was just a volcano of rage spewing at an opponent who had just thoroughly destroyed him.
Harris proved beyond all reasonable doubt she was presidential. Trump again proved he is not.
The Republicans, curiously, find themselves in the same position Democrats were in following the last debate.
Then, on Wednesday the nation took a breath from the divisive politics of the day to remember our fellow Americans who died 23 years ago in the most infamous act of terrorism ever perpetrated against our country. Democrats and Republicans, political rivals and enemies for a brief moment acknowledged what the rest of us face on a daily basis; we are all in it together.
If only Donald Trump and his minions understood and practiced that ideal. But, as my dad used to say, “wish in one hand and s**t in the other and see which one fills up first.” Political realities these days, being an inexhaustible source of feculence, ensure that at least one hand is filled at all times with an undesirable solid waste disposal project – and usually it is courtesy of Donald J. Trump. Five minutes after a somber ceremony in Pennsylvania honoring those who died, Trump was back grifting; asking for money and calling Harris a Marxist.
Trump dabbles in the devious, delights in the disingenuous and hopes to destroy with deception. Being decrepit and a demonically driven demagogue, he has only been successful in duplicity with those who cannot differentiate between fact and fiction.
Immediately following Tuesday’s debate (just think of how far we’ve come since Trump debated Biden in June) Trump again declared victory – saying in emails to his supporters that he destroyed the Harris campaign, while Harris issued an email declaring she had done the same to Trump.
The only thing both camps agree on, seemingly, is that the moderators sucked. I gave both moderators much better grades than their counterparts at CNN during the first debate. ABC News’ David Muir and Linsey Davis actually fact-checked both candidates in real time. Democrats thinks Trump got too much time to talk and was never muted. The right thinks Trump was fact-checked too often and the moderators sided with Harris. The fact that both sides have complaints about the moderators is an indication that they did a better job than their CNN predecessors. Muir was good at fact-checking Trump on the false claim of Haitian immigrants eating pets and pinning Trump down on his 2020 election loss. Davis was really good at getting Trump to shut up when he rambled. Trump and his supporters complained that he was fact-checked more than Harris, but that’s merely an admission that he lied more often than she did.
I covered the Trump administration daily for four years. I came to know him as an unprincipled man of greed, lust and carnal desires that continue to rule him and thus make him unfit for office. As Harris said Tuesday night, he’s a disgrace.
A year ago, I was not a fan of the vice president. I served as the pool reporter on a trip through Los Angeles and noted how laughably inept the staged visit was. I noted that she looked like a local city council member making an appearance rather than the person who was only a heartbeat away from the presidency. Worst of all, she simply wasn’t impressive when she spoke.
Harris has grown considerably in her role since then.
Her acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention was impressive. Though she ad-libbed next to nothing of that speech, she delivered an impassioned call to voters to turn the page on Donald Trump and his outlandish, outmoded thinking. Tuesday night was impressive on another level – she proved not only that she could think on her feet, but she nailed the issues. From the beginning, when she forced Trump to shake hands to her closing when she charted a course for America that resonated, she owned Trump. She looked right at him with the gaze of a prosecutor as she called Trump out, and she looked out at the audience as if we were the jury as she made a plea for a better nation.
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Trump couldn’t offer a complete answer to any policy question. The closest he came was saying he had a “concept” of an idea for healthcare after nine years of dealing with the subject. I guess he was channeling his inner George Costanza. He never said how he could end the wars in either Gaza or Ukraine - though he claimed he would do both. Finally, he failed to explain why he called GOP lawmakers to kill a bipartisan immigration bill while he continued to try and campaign on the issue. Harris nailed him there when she said he “wanted to run on a problem rather than fixing the problem.”
Trump failed to understand the abortion issue and why women are so upset that men get to make choices about their bodies when women cannot. Again, Harris nailed him on that. Davis as moderator asked Trump why women should trust him. He couldn’t answer that. Harris reminded everyone how unconscionable Trump was and that “one does not have to abandon their faith or deeply held beliefs to agree: The government and Donald Trump certainly should not be telling a woman what to do with her body.” At that point in time, they should’ve sent in a coroner to check for Trump’s vital signs. He was dead in the water.
Mind you, Trump didn’t know who was running the Taliban (Abdul?) and when Harris said he was manipulated by flattery from international leaders who laughed at him, he could only say that Viktor Orban loved him.
At the end of the day, even Trump staffers were quietly talking about the fiasco.
Trump is ultimately blind to what America is, and only attracts those who are willing to give up their independence to him and believe that despite whatever facts are available to the contrary – Donald is the only truth-teller.
Of course, to Donny Darko, a day in the life of an immigrant in the U.S. is to wake up in jail, get your transgender operation before you have your dogmeat breakfast, then take over Seattle or a small town in Ohio before you chow down on your favorite feline for dinner.
Bless his heart.
Donald Trump is many things. He is rude, crude, socially unacceptable, inflammatory and demonstrative. He constantly called the U.S. a failing nation, said only he could fix it and that world leaders (who laugh at him) are so afraid of him that if he isn’t let back into the Oval Office, World War III will ensue.
To Harris’ credit, she never took the bait, even as he clumsily tried to talk about race. “Same old lies,” was all she could muster, in between laughs. “Now that’s extreme,” she laughed off his absurd claims about immigrants eating dogs.
At the end of the day, even Trump staffers were quietly talking about the fiasco. “Down ballot Republicans are very angry and worried,” one Trump staffer told me. “We did not do well.” That was certainly the reason why Trump appeared in the “spin room” to talk to reporters after the debate. He was trying to shore up the press response to a horrible outing. It didn’t work.
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The question, of course, is did this debate move the needle at all?
The Republicans, curiously, find themselves in the same position the Democrats were in following the last debate. Trump is seen as old, out of touch and delusional. When Harris mentioned that Trump was still having “a hard time processing” the fact that he lost the last election, to many people she was speaking directly to a loss of mental capacity. “World leaders are laughing at you,” she said to his face. Dictators, “would eat you for lunch,” she chided. And then, she used his own catchphrase against him when she said “81 million people fired you.” He was a crushed lunatic. A cornered sewer rat. She reminded everyone that 200 former Republicans, including some of the highest members of the former Trump administration had endorsed her. He could only lamely say they were all bad people.
But does it matter? For the Trump cult, nothing has nor apparently will it ever make a difference. He consistently polls between 42-44 percent of the electorate who will vote for him. If that number drops below 42 percent in the next few weeks, then Trump is done.
The better chance, of course, is that of the two candidates on stage in Philadelphia Tuesday, only Kamala Harris did what she had to do to reach the fabled undecided voters. “I could see her as the president of the United States,” an undecided voter who is a friend of mine told me after watching the debate. “I didn’t see her that way before.” As for Trump, “He’s a lost ball in the high weeds,” I was told.
Nope. He’s the cornered sewer rat. Norm Ornstein, an American political scientist and an emeritus scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington, D.C., conservative think tank, said on Mary Trump’s “Nerd Avengers” show Tuesday night that a damaged Trump is still a very dangerous Trump. “We cannot rest. We cannot give an inch. Don’t let them get away with the stuff they will try to get away with.”
The Republicans themselves understand the desperation. Though they are at the same place the Democrats were in June, they are well past their national convention and cannot switch candidates as easily as the Democrats did after Biden’s lackluster performance in the June debate. In short, the Republicans are stuck with Donald Trump. Desperation is mounting as the GOP sees its chances to dominate either the Senate or the House dwindling.
That makes Trump and his minions more dangerous by the day.
“We cannot pretend he is not one of the most dangerous people we’ve encountered in American history. He doesn’t care about any of us,” his niece Mary Trump said.
Be wary of that sewer rat.
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