Against my better judgment, I tuned in for the last 45 minutes or so of the Trump/Wallace debate. For anyone who still hopes mass democracy isn’t a fundamentally flawed shit show, well… there you go. Your thesis has been comprehensively refudiated. Back to the drawing board. For the student of human folly, though, it was entertaining.
The bad: Trump came off like he always does — thin-skinned, bullying. He let the Charlottesville slander slide. He’s probably heard it so much it doesn’t even register anymore, but he’s got to oppose that one every single time. Unforced error there. And oh boy, do I ever get where the Normies are coming from with Trump, because I largely feel the same way — I’d much rather hear about Trump than hear him directly, because I just can’t take too much of the guy. Last night was about 42 minutes over my threshold.
But that’s the thing, and a big reason last night’s performance, for all its many and obvious flaws, goes into the win column for Orange Man: That’s who he is. He’s been inescapable for nearly five years now. Even if that kind of thing bugs you, by now you’ve made your peace with it. If you’re any kind of grownup, you let it slide. I’ve served under many a boss I disliked, but who I knew was a good boss, for the organization and for me personally. I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have liked serving under Ulysses Grant, either, but what Lincoln said about him perfectly expresses what I feel about Trump: I can’t spare this man; he fights.
Which feeds into the larger reason last night was a win for Orange Man: Wallace fought, poorly, on behalf of a damsel very obviously in distress. I was hoping Biden’s eyes would actually start bleeding up there on the stage, and compared to the Sundown Joe of “dog-faced pony soldier” and “Corn Pop” fame, he actually came off pretty well last night…
…but that’s the thing: For people who have actually been paying attention, the bar for a decent Biden debate performance was subterranean. But as we all know, most people aren’t paying attention. Trump got in a great shot about this last night, and even Pissy Chrissy Wallace was forced to admit, live and on camera, that Biden’s rallies are “smaller.” Which is to say nonexistent. For obvious reasons Biden’s been running a stealth campaign; I honestly would not be shocked to learn that some huge percentage of Americans don’t even know he’s running. For lots of people, last night was their very first look at the guy.
That’s important, y’all. Think it through: That was Joe Biden at his absolute, chemically-enhanced, fit-rested-and-ready best. That meth-amped rutabaga, the one who called the President of the United States a “racist” and a “clown” to his face, live, on national television. The guy who just cut a whole bunch of Trump’s ads for him by disavowing “the Squad’s” biggest woobies, the “Green New Deal” and “defund the police” (Trump got a nice shot in there, too, telling him “you just lost the Left”). The guy who — again, as Trump ostentatiously pointed out — refused to answer anything about court-packing. We gnostikoi instinctively call Biden’s performance a win, because we more than half expected him to soil himself on stage. To the vast majority of people who only knew the guy by name, it was an abysmal, embarrassing loss. The candidate whose sole source of appeal is “not being Donald Trump” came off as the dumb kid trying to be cool by aping all the school bully’s mannerisms, and cranking them past eleven. At least Trump’s schoolyard-bully act is coherent.
Worst, though, was the fact that Biden was hardly there for much of the “debate.” I don’t mean mentally half there. I mean that he hardly said a word while the so-called “moderator” debated Trump for him. Biden, the ostensible candidate, was reduced for long stretches to Chris Wallace’s amen chorus, contributing little more than shouts of agreement as Wallace read off his campaign’s talking points.
I must admit, y’all, I’m not the fastest on the uptake. How else to explain the fact that, despite huge mountainous shitloads of evidence, I still keep thinking the Media will play it smart for once? The only way to beat an incumbent is to go after his record. There’s lots of unemployment now, there’s lots of violence now, and despite the fact the Democrats are long-term responsible for all those things, it’s a two minute segment — little more than a sound bite. Hit that shit for all it’s worth and force the incumbent to play defense. Make him say little more than “nah-ah! No I di’int!” for his entire two-minute rebuttal (it goes without saying that the questions were rigged this way).
But Wallace couldn’t help himself. From the get-go he made it clear that he was colluding with Biden… and here again, I must be stupid, because I keep thinking the Opposite Rule of Liberalism is just a description, not a diagnosis of a particular form of OCD. But it’s as predictable as sunrise — when the moderator makes a big show of announcing that neither side has been given the questions in advance, that of course means that the Biden campaign had them well in advance. I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if video emerges of Biden and Wallace actually fucking practicing a few hours before the show. Wallace did pretty much all of the “debating,” and did everything short of pulling the fire alarm whenever Biden got into trouble.
All of which means the Media, those morons, are letting Trump run an exact repeat of his 2016 campaign. As I’ve written here many times, “MAGA” might’ve been his campaign’s official slogan back then, but the real one was always “Fuck the Media.” Trump took a few carefully selected shots at Hillary directly, but he never failed to stick it right up the Media’s ass every chance they gave him… which, being narcissistic idiots, they did several times a day. Even his swipes at Hillary were often couched in Media terms — “can you believe they let her get away with this shit?”
Whatever you may think of Trump’s actual debate performance, it’s clear that he was actually “debating” the so-called “moderator,” not Biden. And again, I must be dumb, because my big worry was that the Dems were going to play the sympathy card — that the whole performance would come off like big bully Trump teeing off on a sick old man. And to be fair to myself for a sec, they really did seem to be trying this for a while; Biden appeared, early on, to have been coached to let Trump bluster. But Pissy Chrissy couldn’t help himself, and he ended up flipping the script — instead of a big Orange bully whaling on a helpless old geriatric, we saw two angry little dweebs venting their spleens at the starting quarterback. Hard as this is to imagine, I’m betting Donald Trump came off as the sympathetic one to a lot of people. It’s not quite at the level of “because you’d be in jail,” but Trump’s “I guess I’m debating you now, but that’s ok, I expected it” might be the kill shot of the campaign.
Last but certainly not least, those intrepid enough to browse the Twitter sewers report that lots of Leftists are freaking out, demanding that the remaining debates be cancelled. Which means they think last night was a yuuuge loss for their guy. Cancelling the remaining debates would be the dumbest thing they could do, since it gives Trump endless ammo for “Fuck the Media, again”… but as we’ve seen, these are not intelligent people. It ought to be entertaining, that’s for sure.
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