Donald Trump has an announcement: He won the first debate against Kamala Harris so handily, and was praised so universally for doing so, that he really doesn’t see a need to take the stage with her again.
“When a prizefighter loses a fight, the first words out of his mouth are, ‘I WANT A REMATCH,’” Trump wrote on Truth Social yesterday afternoon. “THERE WILL BE NO THIRD DEBATE!” Happy Friday.
Debates Can Have Consequences
—William Kristol
For all the hoopla that surrounds them, presidential debates usually come and go to little effect. The political world pays attention for a day or two, but the public little notices, nor long remembers, what is said there. One of the candidates may get a little boost and the other take a bit of a hit, then memories fade and the impact dissipates. The campaign caravan moves on.
This is true not just of debates but of many other occurrences in our public life. Things can seem like a very big deal when they happen. Then they fade. That’s the normal course of seemingly dramatic events.
But we don’t live in normal or standard times. For better or worse, in 2024 we seem to be on Lenin Non-Standard Time: “There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.” In such a time, there are moments whose repercussions reverberate and whose impact grows. The aftershocks are even greater than the original disturbance.
That now seems to be the case with Tuesday night’s debate.
For one thing, it seems that Tuesday night’s will be the only Trump-Harris debate. Multiple debates usually result in mixed verdicts, and a general blurring of any one encounter’s impact. Trump’s choice—at least for now—to reject any further debates turns Tuesday night’s affair from a best-of-three series into a one-game elimination playoff.
Trump lost that one debate. Bigly. And he’s been losing as the aftershocks ripple through the political universe.
For example, the debate made it easier for wary Republicans, conservatives, and moderates to come on over to the Harris camp. From former Bush Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to George Will, a permission structure has opened up to allow other current and past Republican officials—perhaps including Gonzales’s former boss, George W. Bush?—to support Harris. No single endorsement may matter much, even if Will remains our leading guardian of the conservative faith. But together, their impact could percolate down to voters.
And then there’s Taylor Swift, who—don’t be shocked!—matters more than Alberto Gonzales or (even!) George Will. Since her endorsement of Harris, there’s been a noticeable surge of voter registration among young people, especially young women.
And then there are the candidates themselves. Harris seems confident, and Trump shaken. And confidence matters in politics, as in other performing arts and other forms of combat, including sports.
The calendar may also be Harris’s friend. The Federal Reserve will cut interest rates next Wednesday, which will be good news. It might make it an opportune moment for a Harris speech laying out a forward-looking economic agenda with a mix of popular progressive proposals and reassuring centrist gestures. Focus group reports after the debate suggested that the Harris campaign still had more work to do to neutralize or limit Trump’s advantage on the issue of the economy. This would be a good time to do that work.
Then the Supreme Court’s 2024-2025 term begins October 7. In the run-up to that, there will be a renewed focus on the Dobbs decision and its fallout, but more broadly on the importance of the next president’s four years of judicial appointments. Harris’s exchange with Trump on abortion rights was the strongest moment of the debate for her, people who have seen the dial tests tell me. A week or two of debate on reproductive rights, judges, and for that matter the rule of law won’t help Trump.
This is all good news, but it’s obviously no reason for overconfidence. The Trump campaign will continue to pummel Harris with ads on immigration and crime, and prior to the debate there’s no question those ads were doing some damage. The fact that the immigration discussion at the debate was about eating pets rather than about the border was a bit of a reprieve for Harris. But it’s only a reprieve, and the Trump campaign will continue to hammer away.
And of course on the disinformation front we have figures from Vladimir Putin to Elon Musk, plus a huge MAGA infrastructure, working hard to confuse and mislead the public. The possible effects of that may not be known but shouldn’t be underestimated.
Trump’s come back before. He’s hard to finish off.
Still, it’s been a good week. Maybe even a historic one.
On Wednesday morning, I wrote: “On June 27, at this year’s first presidential debate, Joe Biden lost his chance for a second term. Last night, at this year’s second presidential debate, Donald Trump may well have lost his chance for a second term.”
I’m now inclined to upgrade “Trump may well have lost his chance for a second term,” to “Trump most likely lost his chance for a second term.”
So I’m upbeat, but still inclined to worry. A likelihood isn’t a reality. There are fifty-three days left to turn it into one.
Grist for the Outrage Mill
—Andrew Egger
Yesterday morning, I wrote about how the MAGA elevation of Springfield, Ohio into a culture-war flashpoint wasn’t just distorting what was happening there—it was exacerbating the divisions in the town itself.
Just hours later, two government buildings and two schools in Springfield were evacuated. Someone had sent bomb threats, Mayor Rob Rue said, as a “hateful response to immigration in our town.” And the Haitian Times news site reported that many Springfield Haitians “are feeling physically unsafe as racist falsehoods spread online and offline.”
Three more quick thoughts here.
Every MAGA story needs a villain within.
The main scapegoats of the moral panic against Springfield’s Haitians are, of course, the Haitians. But we shouldn’t miss that the right-wing outrage machine is outraged at the town’s elected officials too, accusing Rue and his fellow public servants of facilitating the displacement of the town’s population. When Trump endorsed the totally invented “they’re eating the pets” conspiracy theory at the debate Tuesday, he accused local officials of covering it up.
Think about how backwards this is. It’s the members of Springfield city government, not random Republican politicians or conservative influencers online, who are actually working to smooth the social strain the recent wave of migration has brought about. For their trouble, they’re now getting bomb threats.
Anyone who doesn’t join the outrage mob is also an enemy.
Yesterday, I brought up Nathan Clark, the grieving father whose child, Aiden, was killed in a crash involving a Haitian driver last year. That tragedy was a significant contributor to rising tensions in the area. Speaking at a town meeting this week, Clark made an impassioned plea: Just leave my boy out of this. “They can vomit all the hate they want about illegal immigrants,” Clark said. “However, they are not allowed, nor have they ever been allowed, to mention Aiden Clark from Springfield, Ohio.”
Trump supporters online didn’t take that so great:
“It’s sad that he’s okay with other children dying at the hands of illegals.”
“The dad is a mentally ill leftist.”
“Then I guess he should hug Biden and Harris for allowing the ‘immigrant’ to kill his son.”
“Absolute slob, disgusting person.”
“He is putting his politics above the life of his innocent child.”
If Nathan Clark had ranted against Haitian migrants, he would be a hero all over the MAGA internet today. When he denounced the attempt to turn his son into a mascot for racist hate, they made him an object of hate.
Locals get discourse poisoned, too.
One thing we often don’t pay enough attention to is how even people living in the midst of events in real life have their perception of those events shaped by media coverage and discourse online. My most striking experience of this came on January 7, 2021—one day after the January 6th insurrection—when I went back to the National Mall and spoke with a number of people who had themselves participated in the riot the day before. Nearly all of them told me the same thing without prompting: The insurrection had actually been sparked by left-wing Antifa agitators.
This, of course, had been a rampant conspiracy theory on the right-wing internet the day before. But I was gobsmacked to hear it from those who had been on the ground and participated themselves. They’d lived through a historical event, seen it with their own eyes—done it with their own hands!—then gone back to their hotels and plugged their brains into the MAGA media machine to learn what had really happened.
Scroll through Springfield groups on Facebook today, and you’ll see the same thing happening all over.
“I was listening to 95.7 WHIO and Springfield, Ohio was mentioned on a national program,” one poster wrote this week. “I was hearing some disturbing information. The issue that struck me hardest was that an elderly couple was harassed out of their home. And even today they are not able to return. They stated that this horrible act was done by illegal residents. Is this true? And if it is accurate, why have I not heard about it on local news?”
“Because the news is controlled by the demo-rats who caused this problem,” one commenter responded. Another shared links to coverage from Breitbart, adding: “Local citizens are reporting it to local media outlets and social media. The gov people and major media are muffling as dictated by their elites.”
Quick Hits
THE ROT ALL OVER: Over at NOTUS this week, our pal Haley Byrd Wilt went looking for any Republican lawmaker willing to push back on Trump and JD Vance’s racist “they’re eating the pets” lies. The more than two dozen lawmakers she spoke to were “not only indifferent to the former president making these claims; they largely support him spreading the conspiracy.”
Florida Rep. Greg Steube: “Apparently there’s pictures of it. The fact that you’re saying it’s not happening, it’s not true. . . . It’s just interesting that, like, you have news reporters that are taking one guy’s—some city manager or something—when there’s reports. . . . Pictures of Jamaicans and Haitians doing pagan sacrifices. In Ohio.”
Florida Rep. Brian Mast: “It’s not a stereotype that people eat different animals. I mean, it’s just a fact of the matter. . . . I’d say this: They’re stealing the taxpayer dollars.”
Oklahoma Rep. Kevin Hern: “That was kind of wild, wasn’t it?” Hern added it was “interesting” that the debate moderators “readily had something from the city manager” to fact-check Trump’s claims.
Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley: “Immigration and the border is a serious, serious issue. . . . The more the former president talks about that, the better. I just think he’s reflecting where voters are on that. So I’m not going to grade him.”
THE BRAINWORMS BRAIN TRUST: You’ve got to read Joe and Marc’s report from last night about the frantic effort among some ever-so-slightly less deranged Trump allies to put some space between the big guy and psycho provocateur Laura Loomer.
And then marvel at this report from the New York Times, which reports on how the Trump campaign “assembled a ‘social media war room’ in Philadelphia to respond in real time to the debate:
Roughly 18 conservative influencers gathered in a conference room in the Warwick Rittenhouse Square—the same hotel where Ms. Harris was staying—and pounded out ripostes to Ms. Harris’s every utterance during the debate while vigorously defending Mr. Trump.
The group included Chaya Raichik, who is behind the conservative social-media account known as Libs of TikTok and who is known for her transphobic content and smear campaigns against schools, hospitals and libraries. It also included Jack Posobiec, a right-wing podcaster who helped spread the Pizzagate conspiracy theory that Democratic politicians secretly ran a child sex-trafficking ring out of a Washington pizzeria. Also there was Rogan O’Handley, who is best known as DC Draino, an election denialist and vaccine skeptic.
In advance of the event, Mr. Trump sent each person a signed letter thanking him or her “for being a social media warrior in the fight to save our country,” adding that he looked “forward to making viral content with you at the White House in just a few short months.”
Cheap Shots
Only the best people:
The story about Nathan Clark is heartbreaking. I can't imagine losing a child, then having the worse day in my life turned into some political sideshow. Deplorable is too good a word for these ghouls.
MAGA seems to be self-radicalizing at an accelerating rate. I am optimistic about Harris and the Dems, but JVL is correct to ask where we are as a nation if one of our major parties is operated by paranoid conspiracy mongers, fascist-adjacent political operatives, and Christian Nationalists. Not sure how anyone could think the party is salvageable at this point...
And the pet eating conspiracy sounds just like the Satanic Panic from the 80s.