Reigning Cats and Dogs: Trump and Harris’s Black Swan Event

After watching the Trump – Harris live TV debate on Wednesday (Tuesday 10/09/2024 NZ time) and rallies from both of them afterwards and then watching analysis of the debate from American political insiders, pundits and media (of all stars and stripes) my opinion of both of them and of the insiders, pundits, media, and to a large degree the electorate itself, has crystallised and fused into stony derision.

Both congressional caucuses would really prefer someone else to be their candidate, but both parties are forced by circumstance to clutch onto their respective candidates in a fake hug as their credulous sign-toting minions gawp in awe and the 50,000 undecided voters in the half a dozen states (or counties) that will decide the outcome purse their lips, squint, and have yet another go at trying to imagine how their own quality of life will be under the two prospective regimes.

Who do they trust not to fuck it up? At this point – with the polls in the swing states all within the margin or error and the betting markets an even 50-50 – what matters most to those 50,000 will determine the result. Is it pocket book or culture war? Is it personality or policy? These are the arseholes who walk into the ballot booth still pursing their lips and squinting and imagining – knowing only that the hundreds of millions of dollars in advertising that’s been bombarding them means their vote counts enough for them to make the effort to cast it.

He is billed as a grifter, a despot – orange Hitler – the son of a klan-loving New York property tycoon who used his Dad’s inheritance to construct a string of gauche resorts and casinos which he mismanaged time and again into bankruptcy, kept afloat only from dubious credit lines, fraudulently obtained. He was supposed to be a midget-handed, scatter-brained TV-obsessed narcissist, incapable of holding a thought any longer than necessary to figure out how it could relate to himself. He was supposed to be a pussy-grabbing rapist who bullied and berated his way through the Republican primaries shamelessly wrecking the party in the process making it a hollow autocracy. He was supposed to be a Russian stooge who sent love letters to Kim Jong-Un and literally went across to North Korea. His increasingly absent wife clearly despises him. His administration was so chaotic practically no-one who was there will endorse him. And to top off his term when he lost the election of 2020 he encouraged an insurgent mob to storm the Capitol to overturn the certification process and sat with his feet up in the White House with a Diet Coke and KFC and a shit-eating grin on his face as the mob inside smashed their way into the Senate chamber and outside erected gallows to hang his own Vice President – telling them they were beautiful and to go home only after the coup had failed. His egotism is so rank he has never repudiated any of the litany of moronic statements defying belief that he has made as President or since. His multiple indictments and convictions for a multitude of felonies grows by the week. He is so loathed – the public so unsympathetic – that even when he was shot in the head in an assassination attempt there was virtually no measurable fillip at all in his polling despite his fighting response and easily one of the most iconic images so far of the 21^st century.

She is billed as a flake, an airhead – cackling Kamala – the daughter of a Marxist economist who slept her way through the California Democratic machine to ride into the White House as a diversity hire on the tails of the ultimate corrupt establishment figure, the ancient, demented, crooked Joe Biden. She was supposed to be anaemic on ideas, allergic to policy and the Archilles heel of immigration. She was supposed to be the light weight to Biden’s heavyweight: a grinning, giggling, brainless brown barbie doll, tossing word salads of tautologies and pseudo-ontology to the rapturous wonder of her feckless, foolish female acolytes. She was supposed to have no chance against a seasoned politician. When old sleepy Joe did an entire live presidential TV debate in a semi-comatose state so stricken he looked like he was coming towards the light and the calls were being made that night to dump him she wasn’t even in the conversation. For a fortnight after that, as the Palace coup was plotted, she was on the radar merely by default. When Biden put out his suspicious official retirement letter (sans letterhead) he didn’t even mention her existence. The Obamas kept schtum on her too. The Dem bigwigs were toying with an open convention canvassing every other name but hers. She was supposed to go back home to her Brentwood mansion with her Jewish L.A. lawyer husband and endorse whatever candidate Pelosi and her Jewish D.C. politicians would anoint on behalf of AIPAC. That was what she was supposed to do, because evidently to all her colleagues – the people that know her best – she is a flake, an airhead… unelectable.

That is what they were billed as and what they were supposed to be according to their critics, some of their supporters and, largely if not entirely, according to the evidence. However, the American voter, and in particular those 50,000, have no other viable choice but those two characters with their two miserable, scratched records. Add Hillbilly Theil-tied JD “Couch” Vance and Assistant Coach “Tampon” Tim Walz to the equation as their respective running mates and the sum is still a fraction. To put it in that pretentious faux-philosophic Kamala-speak: they are everything in the present that they were in the past unburdened by their promises of what is yet to be.

Which logically brings us to Haitians in Springfield eating people’s cats and dogs.

Donald Trump was swerving wildly in his debate with Kamala Harris. He doesn’t respect her in the same way he respected Hillary Clinton or else he would have stuck to the script and not been drawn into the obvious baiting she threw out. Fortunately for him his supporters are so uncritical when he crashed in a ditch most of them were prepared to go along with the line he had just parked creatively – even if they knew better. His critiques were inchoate and lost in the lane-changing and manic manoeuvrings of his stream of unconsciousness so she slipped through unscathed and emboldened. Her supporters are equally uncritical, so their gushing would have been at Niagara-level regardless, but it was – for the first time – justified. She most definitely had a script and she, very wisely, didn’t budge from it. Her well-honed jibes triggered shouty replies as if on cue. With mics muted her rehearsed face-pulling at him was designed to agitate, but very wisely, he had rehearsed ignoring it. The split screen made her exaggerated expressions appear redolent of Hillary’s irksome condescension and the visage of the sneering Washington elite crept into mind. The bottom line of the exercise – given she was the one introducing herself to the electorate whereas his expectations were already set at a threshold of near lunacy – was for her to look and sound presidential. And she did. Not a great deal of detail or convincing answers exactly, but a presidential vibe it was. Enough for the 50,000 to take her seriously and want to know more – and the TV network focus groups thought as much in their discussions straight afterwards. And he was near lunacy – which was indeed his anticipated baseline. But the one take-away (and I do mean takeaway) from the debate was Trump’s controversial excursion into an unsympathetic examination of Afro-Caribbean cuisine.

The timing of his inflammatory comment may have been random – apropos of nothing she had stated – but given the moderator was ready with a “fact-check” it does suggest it was a known campaign talking point (from JD Vance as it happened). The spectre of unemployed Haitian barbecue aficionados roaming the streets of Springfield for stray pets may sound absurd, but the racist and anti-immigrant message must surely resonate in communities besieged by the wave, or tsunami, of illegal migrants who have poured across the Southern border under the Biden-Harris administration. The politicisation of cultural differences and social friction is hardly new, but Trump’s distasteful treatment of it as raw meat (if you will excuse the expression) to voters is exceptional. All he needs is one instance of that from any non-white person anywhere in the country and he can claim validation. The bigots who might be on the fence or typically non-voters will have swallowed it (excuse me once again) already, but a single documented occurrence will blunt the condemnation and I would not be surprised if that happens and teflon Don slips through again in the minds of the uninformed. There are so many people who want to believe the worst even without evidence and too many willing to forgive the outburst as an archetypical foible.

As for the impact of the debate – beyond establishing Harris’s credentials and Trump’s credulity – this will be seen not so much in the media prognostications but on social media which has overwhelmed mainstream media now to the extent that the micro pieces of the debate in circulation on the socials in aggregate will eclipse the viewership of the live TV debate or the replays of the whole debate. The consequence of this drastically edited redistribution plays better to Trump in my assessment. His angry, combative rebukes package well as short clips and I think his responses are calibrated deliberately with just that in view. Sure, Harris’s clips would play well to her supporters but they won’t quite have the punchy energy that Trump can dish out that cuts through to a disengaged voter scrolling through the endless material the algorithms are delivering. The inattentive voter watching only social media would be left with a far more favourable impression of Trump than he deserves. There’s murmurings of a second debate, but I think Harris should just take the win and not give Trump the chance of redemption because if there is anyone who could turn it around it’s him.