🇺🇸 Harris v. Trump, 55 days out

It’s been a relatively uneventful week or so since my last update here ten days ago, at least when compared to events since Joe Biden dropped out. Immediately after that, the Kamala Harris orchestrated a historical[1] comeback, almost instantly securing the nomination and closing the gap with Trump, bringing the race to as close to a tie as we can reasonably discern.

Since then, though, the two sides seem to have dug in. During the first 10 days of September, the polling has wavered only slightly, and inconclusively. There have been a few events that might have a significant impact, but if so, that impact isn’t yet apparent. Here they are, sorted by my own guesses from most potentially impactful to least:

• Trump made another incoherent speech, the media coverage of it was largely sanitized and normalized, and this started a meta-story about media failing to cover Trump rationally.
• Dick Cheney (!) announced he voting for Harris.
• A Russian op to pay American influencers to spread propaganda was exposed, and covered widely. (Putin, with epic troll of US on Russian TV, endorsed Kamala Harris.)
• There was a school shooting in swing state of Georgia. (“It doesn’t have to be like this,” said Harris. “School shootings are a fact of life,” said Vance.)
• Trump sentencing in his criminal court case was scheduled for after the election.
  • But, some hearings in his other, more serious criminal court case will proceed before the election, which may mean new info is made public.
• Trump ranted and raved incoherently (and self-destructively, I think) outside his civil court case where he is accused of defaming the woman he raped, immediately after he lost the rape case she brought against him. In this new rant, he angrily complained about the other women who have accused him of sex crimes.

So this week I didn’t have time to write about all of the above, but before the debate happens (about 12 hours from when I write this), I want to go on the record with my thoughts on the first couple items, especially the first one, as I think it relates to the debate.

”Sanewashing” becomes the story, after Trump shits the bed at the Economic Club of New York

Generally, over the course of Trump’s political career, the media generally normalizes and sanitizes Trump’s wild and incoherent rants, just as a byproduct of how they cover him. It’s been said before, and it will no doubt keep happening, but in that past week this process itself has become a widely-covered story.

The trigger was Trump’s answer at an appearance in New York to a serious policy question. His answer was so incoherent — and so incompetent — that his evident mental impairment became the story. As it should be, and should continue to be. Much more often, though, the media (perhaps inadvertently) normalizes deranged shit Trump says just by reporting it in a normal way.

In this case, AP provides a great example of truly shit reporting. “Trump suggests tariffs can help solve rising child care costs in a major economic speech,” they reported, but that is absolutely fucking not the main story here. By writing the headline to convey their (extremely generous) interpretation of what they think he was trying to say, they make it sound normal, even boring. But here’s what he literally fucking said:

Question: “If you win in November, can you commit to prioritizing legislation to make child care affordable and if so, what specific piece of legislation will you advance?”

Trump: “Well, I would do that, and we’re sitting down — you know, I was, uh, somebody, we had Sen. Marco Rubio and my daughter, Ivanka, was so, uh, impactful on that issue. It’s a very important issue.

But I think when you talk about the kind of numbers that I’m talking about, that — because child care is child care. It’s, couldn’t — you know, it’s something, you have to have it. In this country, you have to have it.

But when you talk about those numbers compared to the kind of numbers that I’m talking about by taxing foreign nations at levels that they’re not used to but they’ll get used to it very quickly. And it’s not going to stop them from doing business with us, but they’ll have a very substantial tax when they send product into our country.

Those numbers are so much bigger than any numbers that we’re talking about, including child care, that it’s gonna take care. We’re gonna have — I, I look forward to having no deficits within a fairly short period of time. Coupled with, uh, the reductions that I told you about on waste and fraud and all of the other things that are going on in our country — because I have to say with child care, I want to stay with child care, but those numbers are small relative to the kind of economic numbers that I’m talking about, including growth.

But growth also headed up by what the plan is that I just, uh, that I just told you about. We’re gonna be taking in trillions of dollars, and as much as child care is talked about as being expensive, it’s, relatively speaking, not very expensive compared to the kind of numbers we’ll be taking in.

We’re going to make this into an incredible country that can afford to take care of its people and then we’ll worry about the rest of the world. Let’s help other people. But we’re gonna take care of our country first. This is about America first. It’s about: Make America great again. We have to do it, because right now we’re a failing nation. So we’ll take care of it. Thank you. Very good question.”

This bizarre statement was widely ridiculed online, of course. But this time, not all of the mainstream media failed as badly as AP did. The New York Times, which reported on Biden’s age and “senior moments” over and over, has remained weirdly quiet about Trump’s mental acuity — until September 9, when they ran a news analysis piece with the headline, “As Debate Looms, Trump Is Now the One Facing Questions About Age and Capacity”).

They were kind of late to the party, though. Veteran TV analysts, notably Mike Barnacle, have started hammering on the point that the normalization of Trump’s often incoherent, deranged, or infantile comments is a kind of journalistic malpractice. (I agree.) Three days before the Times piece, the San Francisco Chronicle ran an article entitled, “Analysis: Trump’s incomprehensible child care comments appear to have broken a dam”.

Now, I don’t see a huge flood of coverage of this — certainly nowhere near as much as there should be — but I did notice a significant uptick in the number of newspapers and magazines (and online people) writing about it. And I learned a term I had not yet encountered: “sanewashing”, reported here and here.

As is often the case with Trump, the most informative coverage of the debacle came from the comedy world. Seth Meyers covered it better than any TV news has in this video segment.

To those of us who have been watching Trump closely, there were no surprises in his answer. He’s been delusional, absurd, and incoherent for years, even before he got old.

As for why I think this “sanewashing” phenomenon is relevant to the debate, I suspect he will do better in the debate format with short, time-limited answers. His incompetence and mental deficiencies are easier to hide in a 60- or 90-second answer to a question, because that’s often not enough time for a thoughtful answer anyway. You can ramble out the clock until the moderator cuts you off.

In New York, he got devastated by the question asked, because it was a precise, detailed question, and there was no time limit. He was the only speaker. There was nobody there to save him. If he had been capped at 90 seconds, it might never even have become a story.

So… we’ll see, but I think the debate format, like the mainstream media’s penchant to handle Trump statements (e.g. bizarre, disqualifying lies) as if they are just one of two equally valid opinions, is a kind of structural advantage for Trump. It is normalizing.

On the other hand, though, he’s a repulsive, incompetent, mentally-impaired ass-clown. 🍑🤡 That has so far proven impossible for him to hide, and should be a disadvantage.

Dick vs. dick

Dick Cheney was an asshole. I mean, he still is, probably, but he’s old and not in power anymore, so the impact is less now.

I always hated that fuckin’ guy, though, because he was the first elected official I had ever heard articulate the argument, “We might torture and kill some innocent people, but if that’s what it takes to win, then so be it.”.

At that time, it was the shittiest and most un-American thing I had ever heard from any elected official at the federal level. (The killing, I mean… maybe?… war is messy, which is why you should generally try to avoid it. But torturing? Really??)

I’d vote for Cheney over Trump in a heartbeat, though — and so would many Republican voters. Despite MAGA’s firm control over the Republican Party, in terms of numbers real experts estimate red-hat MAGA cult followers make up less than 50% of the registered Republican electorate.

So, I think Dick Cheney’s endorsement of Kamala Harris, and to a lesser extent his daughter’s, might end up mattering, even though generally endorsements don’t matter much. The voters in play are not just the undecideds. The race is razor-thin, so even a 0.5% shift of “never voted Democrat, but don’t like Trump” Republican voters to Harris would probably net her more voters than the 12,284 voters Biden beat Trump by in Georgia.

Sex offender, or really stupid sex offender?

Is this really what a candidate that wants to win should be ranting at length about?

In conclusion: oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck

By all rights, Kamala Harris should absolutely +smoke* this fucking whack-job racist rapist infomercial Mussolini-wannabe.

But by all rights, he should have been laughed off the political stage in 2016. He wasn’t.

There is so much riding on tomorrow’s debate, I can hardly stand to think about it anymore, so I will spend the time between now and then playing Cyberpunk 2077, taking refuge in a fantasy world that is less dystopian and makes more sense than this one.