Olivier Douliery/Pool via AP
It was not the best night for American democracy.
Voting Donald Trump out of office has always been a woefully insufficient solution to the Trump problem. He needs to be voted off the island. Off the planet. And last night, he helped ensure that he will be voted out—well, out of office, at least.
Trump is losing the election, according to the polls. He needs additional support in order to change the trajectory. So which swing voters did Trump’s performance win over? He already had the Klan and the Proud Boys, whose support he gratefully acknowledged and encouraged. He probably nailed down any stray Cossack still pining for a pogrom, not to mention the terrorists of AntiCoh—members of the anti-coherence conspiracy who disrupt sequential thought on the streets of our cities.
Branch out just slightly into larger groups of swing voters, and Trump didn’t do as well. Women, for one, may have been reminded of their interactions with angry, overbearing, out-of-control men. Blacks, Latinos, Asian Americans, and Native Americans, if they noted Trump’s refusal to condemn white supremacy and his call to his backers to flock to polling places to keep people like them from voting, may have experienced a frisson of anxiety. Americans who, as Trump believes, moved to the suburbs for a less stressful life, may have found his rage and divisiveness—and the prospect of four more years of it—to be an unwelcome death knell of civic peace. And so on.
As Senate races these days tend to match voters’ presidential preferences, Republicans in tight races across the country this year likely experienced significant tummy turmoil while watching Trump rant.
If last night had been a party, both host and guests would have reacted to Trump by saying, “Who let him in?” Actually, we know the answer. The Electoral College let him in, and if that’s not a convincing case for its abolition, I don’t know what is.
Given the circumstances of trying to participate in a debate against a guy participating in a demolition derby, Joe Biden acquitted himself reasonably well. He occasionally got to talk policy, particularly on his plans to deal with climate change, though his presentation was no more than a quick tour of bullet points. Still, that was as close as anyone got to laying out a vision for the future. Biden spent most of his time taking it to Trump on the pandemic and the economy, making the case that the shuttered economy is the result of Trump’s failure to develop a plan to deal with the pandemic. There wasn’t time for much else. Biden also won points for being the far more normal human being on the stage, which has never mattered in any of our previous 57 presidential elections as much as it matters in this one.
The media, seemingly more miffed at the lack of decorum than the substance, spent the postgame shows openly calling for no more debates to be held. But after last night, it’s not likely that all that many Americans will tune in anyway. Perhaps Mike Bloomberg can offer to pay any remaining swing voters substantial sums of money to watch them, in the expectation that the more who watch, the more who will vote to remove Trump from office. After last night’s performance, Sheldon Adelson is probably contemplating paying swing voters not to watch.
