Trump vs. Trump

I don’t wish to discuss the debate because I’m not a masochist. It was a crap crêpe. A turd taco. Fecal flan. The American people could be forgiven for rising as one and declaring to Donald Trump and Joe Biden, “Everyone in this country is now dumber for having listened to you. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.” To quote a previous American president, “That was some weird sh**.”

Biden’s debate answers were an omnishambles of evasions, lies, and self-contradictions. He said “the Green New Deal is not my plan” — though his website proudly likens his energy plan to the GND — then said the Green New Deal would “pay for itself,” which makes it sound like a very good plan. He issued talking points as though he were a foreigner flicking desperately through random pages in a political phrase book: “Once again, a woman could be held — make more money because she has a pre-existing condition of pregnancy.” He asserted, “there’s 100 million people who have pre-existing conditions, and they’ll be taken away as well,” a remix of his September 21 claim that “200 million have died” of COVID-19, or his February 25 claim in a primary debate that “150 million have died since 2007” of gun violence.

Biden claimed that Roe v. Wade “is on the ballot,” then clarified, “It’s on the ballot in the court.” His answer to the problem of race and policing was so vapid a Miss America contestant couldn’t have gotten away with it: “We’re going to work this out so we change the way in which we have more transparency.” He gave one of the most discombobulatingly extreme answers anyone has ever given in a presidential debate when he declined to answer whether he would torch a 150-year norm and add seats to the U.S. Supreme Court. Moderator Chris Wallace didn’t press him on the point and when Trump did so it sounded more like heckling than anything else.

Everything Trump said sounded like heckling. He’s the central player in the American drama and yet he still behaves like the back-of-the-class troublemaker interrupting Teach with spitballs. He’s inveterate talk-radio caller-inner Donny from Queens. Virtually every time he opened his mouth, he brought up a valid underlying point around which a compelling argument could be made. Instead of building these points into a coherent structure, though, he just sprayed high-voltage sparks, as though a power line had fallen on the stage. He attacked Biden in lunges, like a blindfolded kid trying to hit the piñata: “But if he ever got to run this country, and they ran it the way he would want to run it, we would have — our suburbs would be gone, our suburbs would be gone, and you would see problems like you’ve never seen.” And that was as close as Trump came to explaining that Biden would continue with the Obama administration’s plan to reshape the suburbs by forcing high-density, low-cost housing to be built in places such as Westchester County — where people choose to live precisely because they like low-density housing and are willing to pay a premium for it. Biden’s plan to provide a public option for health care is a disguised, slow-motion, back-door enactment of Medicare for All that would gradually drive private insurers out of business because they wouldn’t be able to compete with a federal payer. But Trump didn’t say that, he barked “socialist,” which is a label difficult to pin on an avuncular 77-year-old who got the Democratic nomination by seeming like the least socialist guy on the stage.

Recall that on the critical matter of sharply reducing travel from China — a gutsy and difficult call Trump properly made on January 31 — Biden responded by saying, “This is no time for Donald Trump’s record of hysteria, xenophobia, hysterical xenophobia to, uh, and fear-mongering.” He then refused to acknowledge until April 3 that it was the right decision. But on debate night, the best Trump could do to explain how colossally wrong Biden had been was to offer this: “I closed it and you said he’s xenophobic, he’s a racist and xenophobic because you didn’t close in our country. You didn’t think we should have closed our country because you thought it was too — it was terrible.” How is any voter unfamiliar with the exact details of this turning point — which is most voters, maybe even the vast majority of voters — supposed to sort out what Trump is talking about here? Even when he’s right, he can’t explain why. He’s a former TV star who can’t do a simple sound bite.

A Joe Biden presidency would be a disaster. There’s no telling how extreme his administration might be because he won’t disavow proposals that are so far from the mainstream that even Barack Obama didn’t dare approach them — the Green New Deal, a public option for health insurance that would destroy the private market, packing the very Supreme Court that is the leading bulwark between this republic and the banana variety. And yet Biden is very likely to get elected because his policies aren’t the issue. They can’t be the issue because no one can get past the various reflexes that constitute Trump’s personality. Trump won’t let us. He makes sure he’s the only thing we can discuss. He blots out the sun. Policy matters more than personality. But Trump’s horrible personality is going to leave us beholden to Biden’s horrible policy.