“In Springfield, they are eating the dogs,” declared Donald Trump during the Presidential debate last night. “They’re eating the cats.” He was referring to a debunked internet conspiracy involving Haitian immigrants. The rumours, apparently, had originated with a Facebook post citing “my neighbour’s daughter’s friend”. Harris shook her head and laughed her strange laugh. So it was that we realised that America was having a normal one.
In the old days, presidential debates were serious affairs that pitched policy against policy and character against character, with two authentic visions for the future of the United States – and the world – presented with some credibility. It is hard even to remember that such an America existed.
Will those days ever return? It seems unlikely. Since the rise of Donald Trump, the events have descended into fever dreams of slagging matches, wild claims, low-grade theatrics and gibberish.
But Trump is not the only one to blame. Last night, after the two candidates raised eyebrows by actually shaking hands like grownups – unlike when Joe Biden faced the same opponent just two months ago – Kamala Harris played her part in the fiasco by trying to goad the former President to distraction. “People start leaving his rallies early out of exhaustion and boredom,” she jibed.
The Donald shot back: “People don’t leave my rallies. The biggest rallies, the most incredible rallies in the history of politics.” At another point, he tried a different approach. “She’s a Marxist,” he claimed. “Everybody knows she’s a Marxist.” In the darker depths of the internet, perhaps.
Harris kept on at it, describing Trump – not entirely unfairly – as “someone who has been prosecuted for national security crimes, economic crimes, election interference, has been found liable for sexual assault and his next big court appearance is in November, at his own criminal sentencing.”
She also pressed him to disavow his own fanatical hardcore, but he refused to acknowledge that he had been “fired by 81 million people” in 2020 and dodged a question about whether he had any regrets over the January 6 riots on Capitol Hill.
Under pressure, Trump resorted to the grievance culture of his left-behind voters. “I probably took a bullet to the head because of the things they say about me,” he blurted. Harris is five-foot four and Trump is six-foot-three. There was the occasional whiff of David and Goliath about it.
But the irony of the whole thing was that many sane observers – including, most importantly, independent voters – remain unconvinced that Harris would be a better option than Trump. Until the day of the debate, her website had lots of fluffy, “my story” stuff but no policy page. A glance at her track record of pronouncements left the public none the wiser. Was she against fracking or for it? Did she wish to spend more on the police or defund it? Were illegal immigrants criminals or not? Her every statement, it seems, has been either a flip or a flop. Sometimes both.
That, of course, is why the Democrats kept Biden on life support for as long as they did. But that is now pre-history. At the convention in Chicago, the reset button was slammed so hard that we veered into a parallel reality where Harris was reborn as a candidate of strength and substance, who had the capacity to fill every American with transcendental joy and had never been weird at all.
Everybody did their best to forget that as Vice President, she shared responsibility for the messy furrow of the Biden years, foreign policy disasters, migration chaos, soaring inflation and all. This was Harris 2.0. She could have fallen out of a coconut tree. She was fully unburdened by what has been.
Such was the illusion that propelled the country into the gaudy razzamatazz of last night. On abortion, Harris landed a heavy glove, stating with some conviction that “Donald Trump certainly should not be telling a woman what to do with her body”. That was a consequential moment: abortion is a top issue for many voters following the 2022 Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v Wade, and Trump flailed around with vagaries, half-answers and bluster. In the end, he resorted to claiming that Harris would allow abortions of living babies, which was absurdly false.
But did that moment convince anybody outside of the Harris base? So polarised is America that most people know where they stand on that matter anyway.
So we came to foreign policy. On Ukraine, Trump was only able to confirm that he “wants the war to stop”, claiming vaguely that he would be able to bring peace via negotiations. This allowed Harris to deliver the zinger that “if Donald Trump were president, Putin would be sitting in Kyiv right now,” accusing her opponent of “ador(ing) strong men instead of caring about democracy”.
It was only when the subject of Israel came up that Harris seemed to wobble. With 80 per cent of Americans – entirely reasonably – backing the Jewish state against its jihadi enemy, her claims that “far too many innocent Palestinians have been killed, children, mothers” may have given her progressive supporters a frisson of ghoulish pleasure, but left many independents cold.
Similarly, although she insisted that she would “always give Israel the ability to defend itself,” and wanted security for the Jewish state, she could not prevent herself from adding the caveat, “and in equal measure for the Palestinians”. Her repeated desire for a “ceasefire deal” rang hollow given how long she and Biden have been trying, and failing, to get one over the line.
Trump exploited this weakness, repeatedly accusing his opposite number of “hating” the Jewish state and suggesting that the country “won’t exist in two years” if she won the White House. He did not explain how this would be so. But he didn’t need to. This is the man who put the Ayatollah on the ropes, killed Qasem Soleimani and moved the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. This is the man who has a village in northern Israel named after him. The blow landed.
The two candidates had crashed into the debate neck-and-neck, with the Harris honeymoon giving way to a dead heat in the national vote and an even split in the swing states. They emerged from it in much the same position, though there was a sense that Harris had inched ahead.
Would a Trump defeat be the best thing for the United States? For the world? The debasement of American politics is such that it is hard to answer that question as one might in normal times.