Jim Bourg/AP Photo
It was a debate where Donald Trump was graded on a curve for not interrupting and shouting at his opponent.
If ever there was a beneficiary of “the soft bigotry of low expectations”—a line Republicans used to hurl at Democrats in referring to their alleged coddling of minorities—it was Donald Trump in last night’s debate.
According to the media, Trump performed better than he did in the first debate. He didn’t interrupt! He never was completely unintelligible! He took his handlers’ direction! He actually, on occasion, expressed views on policy!
Well, yes. But nearly everything he said was a fabrication, a deliberate misstatement, or a Goebbels-esque lie—particularly when he turned to his own record as president.
Not only did Trump claim to have done more for Blacks than any president “with the possible exception of Abraham Lincoln” (a rare moment of modesty). But he also was a champion for the environment, the scourge of Vladimir Putin, and an admirer of Anthony Fauci.
The question such claims raise is, who does Trump think believes this crap? Those Americans fed a steady diet of Fox News fictions have had their brains so cumulatively softened that they’ll accept that nonsense as fact. But Trump already has their votes. As for everyone else, Trump’s claims that he is what he isn’t only undercut whatever credibility he may have had in his attacks on Joe Biden’s probity. Whatever credence one might attach to Rudy Giuliani’s discovery of a mysterious laptop that revealed Hunter Biden’s corruption and the secrets of the cosmos isn’t exactly heightened by Trump’s assertions that he’s Russia’s biggest enemy and Blacks’ best friend.
Republicans have employed the Big Lie before and gotten away with it. See, for instance, George W. Bush’s 2004 completely fictitious “swiftboat” allegations that John Kerry didn’t really encounter enemy fire and comport himself well while serving in Vietnam. But Bush didn’t also claim to be a Kennedyesque liberal or on the verge of finding Osama bin Laden. (For that matter, he didn’t make the swiftboat allegations himself; he left that to an “independent” campaign waged on his behalf.) You only undermine your Big Lie, Bush’s handlers understood, by surrounding it with a host of demonstrably preposterous claims. Somehow, someone neglected to convey that bit of strategic wisdom to Trump.
To the contrary, Trump took life lessons from his mentor in mendacity, Roy Cohn. What Trump has failed to realize was that Cohn never knew when to stop, to the point that he ultimately destroyed the McCarthyism he had singularly aided as Joseph McCarthy’s chief aide. Attacking State Department diplomats and public schoolteachers—effete elitists all—for doing the communists’ dirty work was a Big Lie that worked for a time, but then Cohn prodded McCarthy to go after the Army for failing to treat Cohn’s boyfriend with the reverence due him because he was Cohn’s main squeeze. The Army, not surprisingly, fought back, and the claim that it, too, was Moscow’s tool was so ridiculous that it brought McCarthy down. (Of course, Fox News wasn’t around then.)
Trump seems to have missed this chapter in the Adventures of Roy Cohn. He’s never believed that there are lies so ridiculous, or that lies can be so pervasive, that they undermine whatever really strategic false allegation he wants to level.
But then, how could he understand that, when all he knows is what he hears on Fox News? How could he grasp that, when his debate coaches, while telling him to stop interrupting, suggest he claim he’s been great for the Black folks, the enemy of dangerous pollutants, the squeaky-clean campaign finance reformer denying Wall Street donations on principle, and the righteous avenger of Joe Biden’s crooked deals with foreign governments, even if that last claim is based on innuendo generated by his own campaign, rather than on any evidence? How could he comprehend that, when everything he has, beyond his inheritance, has come from his bluster, his chicanery, his lies?
Biden, by contrast, had a few moments when he was honest to a fault—saying, perhaps due as much to fatigue as to honesty, that his policy was to phase out the oil industry. (He cleaned this up after the debate by saying he meant phasing out oil industry subsidies, but the original sound bite, alas, is not yet the key to winning Texas.) His overall performance was good enough to produce a draw—if you didn’t mark Trump down for dishonesty, which some in the media appear reluctant to do. And what Trump may have gained in America’s oil patch he lost among American mothers by his insistence that the 500-plus children still without their parents after Trump ordered this family separation were “so well taken care of.”
Trump has one thing going for him. Americans, by now, are largely inured to his lying, and he counts on this. By the same token, though, only the Trump faithful take his charges seriously. That’s one reason among many why I don’t think this debate changed many votes. By now, every charge Trump makes is old news, dismissible, a yawner. And absent a charge that actually sticks, Joe Biden will be our next president.
