For weeks now in the pages of this blog I’ve been complaining about how the press has been “sanewashing” Donald Trump, giving him a pass on outrageous and deranged comments that for any other politician would have been not just campaign-ending, but career-ending.

That phenomenon has been in play since he descended that golden escalator in Trump Tower in 2015, but has been particularly egregious of late. Trump claims that elementary schools are performing gender reassignment surgery on children without their parents’ knowledge and the press reports his remarks with headlines like “Trump Ties Healthcare to Public Education.” OK that one is fictional, but it’s actually not any more outlandish than any of the real examples out there, like the incomprehensible word salad he unleashed in answer to a straightforward question about childcare, which prompted The New York Times’s headline “Trump Praises Tariffs, William McKinley to Power Brokers.” Or when he risibly says, without explaining how, that his proposed tax cut for the 1% won’t add $7 trillion to the national debt—atop the cut he gave those same rich people in 2017 that already added $7 trillion the debt—and The Washington Post reports that “analysts are skeptical.” The pattern has gotten so bad that Alexandra Petri mocked it in the pages of that very paper in a piece called “The Wonderful Trump Headline Machine.”.

But during the debate last Tuesday night there was no media mechanism to hide his crazy, and Donald could not gaslight us any longer as the whole nation saw before its eyes how shamelessly dishonest and absolutely batshit this motherfucker is. The nonstop lies, baseless attacks, and incomprehensible stemwinders wildly detached from reality that poured out of his cakehole over that 90 minutes were, uh, instructive, and there was no editorial filter there to mitigate them.

Trump said a number of absolutely deranged things that evening, but by far the most attention-grabbing and durable in the public consciousness was his comment about immigrants supposedly eating household pets in the town of Springfield, Ohio. In some ways, it was no different—and in some ways less extreme—than many of his other remarks, like his claim that the Vice President of the United States is a Marxist, or his continued assertion that Democrats support (and are actively practicing) the murder of newborn babies. Another low point was Trump’s inability to explain his healthcare plan, even after nine years of promising a “beautiful” replacement for Obamacare, and nine years of failing to provide even a single concrete detail. (Even more outrageous: his insistence that he can’t work on it now, because he’s not yet president.) Asked if he had even a plan, Trump said he had “concepts of a plan.” (Am I the only one who thought of that throwaway line from Annie Hall, where someone at a Hollywood party says, “Right now it’s only a notion, but I think I can get the money to make it into a concept, and later turn it into an idea.”)

But the sheer weirdness of the pet-eating story seems destined to go down in American political history, along with other memorable Trumpisms like “I alone can fix it,” “stand back and stand by,” “that makes me smart,” and of course my personal favorite, “losers and suckers.”

For once, the ridicule was immediate and intense. Susan Glasser of The New Yorker quipped, “I’ve watched every Presidential debate for the past two decades, and I can’t think of anything that ranks higher in pure stupidity.” Hank Azaria voiced the Simpsons’ Chief Wiggum responding to the crisis; a musical parody went viral. And the response continues to carry on, even as I write this five days after the event. Trump, naturally, has only doubled down, recently adding geese to the menu. (Chicks and ducks and geese better scurry indeed.) “Trump Drags New Animal into His Debunked Claims Haitian Migrants Are Eating Pets” noted The Independent drily.

It’s all hilarious, right?

Except for this:

Following Trump’s lies about pet-eating, some of his hideous disciples called in bomb threats to two different elementary schools in Springfield, forcing them to be evacuated, and a third threat to a middle school which had to be closed completely. The next day, two hospitals, a medical clinic, and a fourth unspecified facility received similar threats. Wittenberg University, a small private liberal arts college in Springfield, canceled all activities following anonymous threats to Haitian members of the community, including warnings of a mass shooting that required the intervention of the FBI. And lest you think it was just the proverbial and perennially blamed “lone wolf,” the Springfield city government reported that bomb threats were also emailed “to multiple agencies and media outlets” in the town. Bomb-sniffing dogs had to be deployed to schools, city hall, the county courthouse, and even DMV offices.

So as funny as it is, it really ain’t funny at all. Virtually everything Trump says and does is inevitably a provocation for political violence by his fanatic cult.

(I DON’T WANNA BE BURIED IN A) PET SEMATARY

At his rallies, Trump has inexplicably been known to praise the fictional cannibal Hannibal Lecter of Silence of the Lambs fame—whom he does not seem aware is not a real person—so he obviously has an interest in cuisine. (Try the taco bowl at the Trump Grill!) But where did this particular culinary fantasy come from?

According to Heather Cox Richardson, citing Hunter Walker and Josh Kovensky of Talking Points Memo, it originated more than two months ago, with James “J.D.” Vance nee Bowman, a US Senator from that very Buckeye state, trying to blame immigrants for rising housing prices in Springfield, accusing “illegals” of swarming the city. Like Trump’s subsequent comments, Vance’s had very real and scary repercussions. HCR takes up the story from there:

On August 10, about a dozen neo-Nazis of the “Blood Tribe” organization showed up in Springfield, where one of their leaders said the city had been taken over by “degenerate third worlders” and blamed the Jews for the influx of migrants. The neo-Nazis stayed and, on August 27, showed up at a meeting of the city council, where their leader threatened council members. On September 1, another white supremacist group, Patriot Front, held its own “protest to the mass influx of unassimilable Haitian migrants” in the city.

That led to an urban myth (sometimes called a “lie”) posted in a private Facebook group about  Haitian immigrants allegedly butchering a neighbor’s cat for food, which Vance reposted. Officials in Springfield have repeatedly denied the stories as completely unfounded. “Nonetheless,” Richardson writes, “on September 10, Vance told his people to ‘keep the cat memes flowing,’ even though—or perhaps because—the rumors were putting people in his own state in danger.”

And while, as always, the cruelty is in and of itself the point, Vance and his ilk have another more concrete motive as well.

The widespread ridicule of Trump’s statement has obscured that this attack on Ohio’s immigrants is part of an attempt to regain control of the Senate. Convincing Ohio voters that the immigrants in their midst are subhuman could help Republicans defeat popular Democratic incumbent senator Sherrod Brown, who has held his seat since 2007. Brown and Montana’s Jon Tester, both Democrats in states that supported Trump in 2020, are key to controlling the Senate. 

Two Republican super PACs, one of which is linked to Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), have booked more than $82 million of ad space in Ohio between Labor Day and the election and are focusing on immigration. 

Taking control of the Senate would enable Republicans not only to block all popular Democratic legislation, as they did with gun reform after the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre, but to continue to establish control of America’s judicial system. So long as their judges are in place to make law from the bench, what the majority of Americans want doesn’t matter.

HCR explains that stacking the courts and utilizing the filibuster were key parts of the GOP plan to stop Democratic governance in its tracks. She goes on to quote Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern:

(McConnell) realized you don’t need to win elections to enact Republican policy. You don’t need to change hearts and minds. You don’t need to push ballot initiatives or win over the views of the people. All you have to do is stack the courts. You only need 51 votes in the Senate to stack the courts with far-right partisan activists…[a]nd they will enact Republican policies under the guise of judicial review, policies that could never pass through the democratic process. And those policies will be bulletproof, because they will be called “law.”

As I say: Not funny at all.

THE MASTER DEBATER

The good news is that the debate has cast a blinding public spotlight on Trump’s mental unfitness from which he could not flee, cockroach-like. It’s sweet. The last debate showed Joe Biden to be a doddering old man, precisely the narrative the GOP had been relentlessly propagating for the last three years. This time, Trump was cast in that role. And in fact, far worse than just benignly “doddering.” CNN recently produced an eyepopping video comparing the Trumps of 2016 and 2024. He was always a lying POS, but he used to put the act across with a veneer of rationality, or at least in semi-complete sentences. Now he’s openly cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs. (For even more evidence of his cognitive decline, check him out on Letterman in the ’80s.)

My one complaint, in keeping with The Atlantic’s Tom Nichols, is that the moderators’ first question to Trump at the debate should have been: “Given that you tried to overthrow the last presidential election by force, why the hell should any American consider putting you back in the White House?” It wasn’t, but they still did a pretty good job of holding his feet to the fire, even if they did get bullied into turning his mic on when he should have been shut down. Trump’s time of possession was like 43 minutes to Kamala’s 37, but as Benjamin Wallace-Wells noted in The New Yorker, the more he talked the better she did.

Kamala got under Trump’s skin with carefully calculated barbs to which he could not resist responding, even when it was tactically stupid to do so, taking the bait every time it was offered. “I wish I had fish that stupid,” my fishermen friends told me. In front of God and the world, Trump displayed the impulse control of a toddler, if that isn’t an insult to toddlers—not a great look on someone auditioning to be leader of the free world, again. It was the meltdown we had all longed for.

Kamala’s performance was likewise all we hoped for, and more. In a stark split screen, she exposed Trump for the lying, deranged, cognitively impaired cretin he is while demonstrating her own fitness to be head of state, refuting Trump’s relentless racist and misogynist attacks by dint of her sheer command of the stage and of the facts. For anyone watching with a shred of objectivity, it was a hugely impressive audition for a promotion from her current job to the next higher gig, which is the 47^th President of the United States.

In another example of the double standard applied to Trump, it was also the performance Kamala almost had to deliver: anything short of that TKO would have been adjudged a failure. Once again, a woman—and a person of color, let alone a woman of color—had to be twice as good as a white man to get anything close to the same credit. Luckily, she was about a million times better. As The Bulwark’s Jonathan V. Last asked of remaining doubters among so-called centrist voters, “What More Do You People Want from Kamala Harris?”

But given the curve on which the MSM perennially grades Trump, I half expected the press to let his debate debacle slide too. On that count I was pleasantly surprised. Evidently it was just too disastrous, even for people who selfishly prefer a horserace, and the verdict was uniformly scathing, even in the right wing media.

Never one to be bothered by the facts, Trump is still going around insisting the “everyone” agrees he won the debate, citing totally made-up polling of 92% to 8%. (The air is surprisingly thin at sea level in Mar-a-Lago.) The real numbers are more like 63-37 in favor of Kamala, almost exactly the reverse of the debate on June 27 that eventually forced Biden out of the race. And that 37% likely represents a Kool Aid-drunk segment of the electorate that would say Trump won even if he simultaneously vomited and shat himself on live TV.

Despite his wolf tickets, Trump himself was and is clearly rattled, as evidenced by the appearance of John Barron himself in the spin room afterwards—the sure sign of a desperate, defeated debater. In that room, Never Trump conservative Tim Miller of The Bulwark repeatedly (and gleefully) asked him why he couldn’t even “look in the alpha dog vice president’s general direction.” Trump refused to answer, slinking away tail-between-his-legs the way a beaten dog does.

Only a few Republicans made half-hearted attempts to defend their man, mostly with predictable complaints about the moderators for, you know, factchecking him instead of rolling over in front of the steamroller of deception like reporters usually do. Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-Tex.) whined that Kamala kept “sneering and jeering at (her opponent) like a child,” behavior he seems to think is unpresidential or something. (He knows his party’s nominee is Donald Trump, right?) In the UK, the Torygraph tried to blame Biden for Trump’s self-own on the cats-and-dogs thing with some sort of Rube Goldberg-style explanation I can’t begin to understand. On both sides of the Atlantic, there is no absurdist bridge too far for the right wing.

To that end, The Wall Street Journal ran an editorial titled “Trump Lets Harris Off the Debate Hook,” claiming that the Republican nominee missed his chance to attack his Democratic rival on policy. As Andy Millman would say, are you having a laugh? Trump has no “policy” except for the 920-odd page blueprint laid out in Project 2025, translated from the original German. 

Yet even the Journal, in a piece by Peggy Noonan, called it a “decisive” win for Kamala, though the Pegster still sniffed that the win was “shallow.” Well, boo-hoo. I’ve noticed that Republicans are perfectly happy to take any kind of win for their own side, shallow or otherwise, decisive or not. In fact, they’re happy to take a win even when they lose.

CLEANUP ON AISLE FIVE

We may have just seen the two most decisive and important presidential debates—in a row, no less—since Nixon neglected to shave in 1960. But the question remains what the ultimate outcome will be.

Brendan Buck, formerly an adviser to John Boehner and Paul Ryan, was emblematic of many observers—especially those who tilt conservative, anti-Trump or otherwise—in noting that Kamala indeed wiped the floor with Trump, but it may not matter. That is a sad fact of our hyper-polarized, anti-democratic political system, where a minority of white nationalist radicals comprising a cult of personality around a shameless con artist can legally take the reins of power. We all know that lots of presidential candidates have won debates and gone on to lose the election, including Hillary in 2016 and Gore in 2000, both of whom also won the popular vote. And this election in particular is not being contested in a reality-based world where the obviously superior candidate can expect to triumph over a human dumpster fire. Case in point: a majority of Americans continue to tell pollsters that they trust Trump more on the economy (!), immigration (!!) and foreign policy (!!!). Yes, and I think a flaming bag of dogshit would make an excellent neurosurgeon.

Mind-boggling. So maybe Buck is right and the debate might not matter.

But then again, it might matter a lot, especially in a race this close, where a few thousand votes in certain counties might make all the difference. We don’t know what its long-term impact will be, but it damn sure didn’t hurt. Famed GOP pollster Frank Luntz sure thinks so, declaring Trump’s campaign “over.” Every millimeter Kamala gains, and her continued momentum, are highly encouraging.

Is the Trump cult of personality beginning to fracture at last? Is our long national nightmare coming to an end, and sanity returning to the body politic? Maybe Trump’s campaign is in chaos, with the likes of  George Will and even torture enthusiasts Dick Cheney and Alberto Gonzales publicly coming out against him. (Not Peggy Noonan though! She still thinks a twice impeached, 34 times convicted felon and openly aspiring dictator might offer a better vision for America’s future than some uppity Democrat!) But we’ve had far too many premature announcements of his political demise to fall for that yet again, Lucy-and-Charlie-Brown-style. Lately Trump’s been hanging around with Laura Loomer, a far far right wing racist nutjob and 9/11 truther who makes Marjorie Taylor Greene look like Grace Kelly. Is that a sign of how he far gone and pathetic his campaign has become, or of how bad our future might be?

As the presence of Ms. Loomer suggests, in the fifty-some days remaining before the election, if Trump begins to panic and sense defeat (which he clearly seems to be doing), you can bet that the ugliness and the viciousness of his attacks on Kamala Harris, and his side’s willingness to cheat in order to win, or just to cast doubt upon their loss, even to the point of engaging in violence, will only rise. So caution: rough road ahead.  Trump could still win.

It has long been the case that a Trump victory this November would be a shocking injustice and a brutal irony almost too much to bear. That remains so. But after that debate, and his appalling performance on national television in front of millions of Americans, it would be more horrific than ever. Watch this space…..or better yet, get out and vote, and be prepared to counter the inevitable right wing ratfucking that has already begun, and will carry on right through Election Day and after.

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Photo: REUTERS/Brian Snyder

Thanks Ed Engel for the Oklahoma! Joke.