nTrump Is Scared Shitless: He Can't Handle the Truth, so He Wouldn't Let Biden Talk
by Amanda Marcotte | October 1, 2020 - 8:44am | permalink
Forget the euphemistic language being used by much of the mainstream press to describe Tuesday night's presidential debate between Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden. That wasn't a "contentious debate," nor were the candidates "bickering." No, Biden showed up to do normal politician things, only to find himself trapped on stage with Trump, a shit-flinging monkey whose only purpose was to prevent anything resembling truth from slipping through and touching the ears of the public.
For an hour and a half, the same thing kept happening over and over. (And over, and over.) Biden would try to talk, about literally anything — Trump's failures, his own policy ideas, the state of the nation, hell, possibly the weather — and Trump would immediately interrupt the second he heard a truth about to be stated, ranting over Biden and silencing any factual information or expression of decency under a blanket of lies and vitriol.
Trump and his supporters no doubt imagine that his performance was a triumphant display of animalistic dominance. But like all bullies, their posturing is a thin disguise for the cowardice underneath. What was really on stage was a man so incredibly terrified of being held to account, even a little, and so fearful of the facts that he lashed out like a cornered rat at even the barest hint that his opponent might say things that are true.
Trump lied about everything: Health care, the coronavirus, mail-in ballots, the economy, jobs, policing, Black Lives Matter protests and on and on.
It would certainly be easier to list the things he didn't lie about.
Unfortunately, that list has only one item on it: Trump was entirely sincere about his unwillingness to condemn white supremacists and right-wing militias. We can go ahead and trust Trump was telling the truth when he asked such groups to "stand by," building on his already extensive history of encouraging armed far-right militants to use violence and intimidation to help him steal the election.
by Jeremy Sherman | October 1, 2020 - 8:30am | permalink
The kid is in his room playing video games. Mom calls to him that it's time to do chores and homework.
The kid's head is in the game, a first person shooter. He's in a tank mowing down everyone in his path. There's some heroic theme to the game but the details don't matter. All he knows is he's on the side of everything right, righteous and mighty. It's his call of duty, and now his mom is saying duty calls. Fuck that!
Still playing, he brays at his mom through his bedroom door, spouting whatever to get her to back off. He pouts, moans, whines, bleats, blasts, snarls, barks, scolds, preaches, condemns, threatens — to him it's all just noises to keep his pathway clear, the airhorn of intransigence.
He brays it all with theatric earnestness to give the impression that his substantive arguments trump all other considerations. All the braying means is, "Reality can go fuck itself and so can you because I'm not budging."
His mom is trying to teach conscientiousness by example. The kid's fake earnestness tugs at her which plays right to the kid's advantage. As she poses counter-arguments as though he's doing more than braying, the kid gets to keep on playing.
* * *
Lying is knowing you're not telling the truth. Bullshitting is not caring what's true. The kid doesn't care what's true. He's bullshitting to bulldoze through anything that thwarts him – bullshitdozing. And it's working because his mother is lulled to sleep, dozed off on the bullshit.
Bullshitdozing is all there has ever been to the Trump cult. The reasons why reality owes the Trump cult total accommodation are as irrelevant as whatever arguments the brat brays.
This alone, explains the incoherence and hypocrisy. It's not calculated but cacophony. You wouldn't expect a goat to bray coherently. It's all just animal grunting and territorial pissing, the anthem rock of "You change. We won't."
My house is blissfully quiet, but my ears are still ringing.
The first presidential debate of 2020 was unlike anything we have seen before. CNN’s Jake Tapper said: “That was a hot mess, inside a dumpster fire, inside a train wreck.” “He was his own tweets come to life.” “We’ll talk about who won the debate, who lost the debate … One thing for sure, the American people lost.” Conservative pundit William Kristol called it “a spectacle… an embarrassment… a disgrace… because of the behavior of one man, Donald Trump. The interrupting and the bullying, the absence of both decency and dignity — those were Donald Trump’s distinctive contributions to the evening, and they gave the affair the rare and sickening character of a national humiliation.”
by Thom Hartmann | October 1, 2020 - 7:29am | permalink
What we saw last night was the dictator's playbook.
Tell violent white supremacist racists to "stand by" and encourage them to show up at polling places to intimidate voters.
Bully, bluster and threaten like Mussolini did, promoting your brand as "tough guy" when in fact you’re a lazy coward.
Claim that the other side is evil, like Hitler did, setting up excuses for state-run police violence and vigilante brutality.
Trash-talk democratic institutions, including the vote, like Hungary's Victor Orban and and Saudi Arabia's dictator Mohammed bin Salman do.
While millions of Americans are struggling with loss of jobs, lack of healthcare during a pandemic, and an absolutely gutted social safety net after 40 years of Reaganomics, all Trump did was brag, yell, and threaten.
This is classic dictator's playbook.
The only winner of last night's "debate" was dictatorship and oligarchy.
by Michael Winship | October 1, 2020 - 7:18am | permalink
Just minutes in, Trump turned it into a travesty; bellowing, repeatedly interrupting and talking out of turn, lying, pigheadedly violating the agreements carefully worked out by the official Commission on Presidential Debates and both campaign staffs for a proper discussion of policy. At a time when we’re desperate for rational solutions, Trump was the proverbial bull in the china shop of democracy, and when he was done there was barely a piece of porcelain left intact. He acted as if this was one of his rallies, God help us, playing to our lowest animal instincts and insulting our intelligence.
Throughout his life and so-called career, Trump has always insisted that rules are for suckers and don’t apply to him—he can shoot a person on Fifth Avenue, grab a woman by her genitals, refuse to pay his millions of debt—and last night was no exception. By all accounts, what happened Tuesday is what he planned all along. Maybe it satisfied his bloodthirsty, delusional base, stewing in a toxic soup of Fox News and QAnon conspiracies, but for most of us it was one more manifestation of the tragedy imposed on the nation—and the world—by a megalomaniac with nary a scruple or a scintilla of human kindness.
Behind in the polls, perhaps it was an act of desperation on his part, as some have suggested, a ploy to make Biden seem weak. If so, it backfired miserably and was just a further demonstration of why he is the worst president in the history of the United States—and we’ve had some beauts. Unfit for office, corrupt, delusional: a real triple threat. He must not receive a second term.
by Robert Reich | October 1, 2020 - 6:46am | permalink
The first presidential debate was as horrific as we feared it would be. We were barely able to hear a word from Joe Biden or moderator Chris Wallace thanks to Trump’s incessant interruptions and nonstop insults. Here are the six most revealing moments:
1.Trump refused to disavow white supremacy.
He reiterated his baseless claims that anti-fascist groups and left-wing organizers were the ones causing violence – a narrative contradicted by multiple studies and his own national security officials. The violence Trump claims is the greatest threat facing our country does not exist. The latest draft of the Department of Homeland Security’s threat assessment report characterizes white supremacy as the “most persistent and lethal threat” to national security.
by William Rivers Pitt | October 1, 2020 - 5:52am | permalink
In the lost innocence of yesterday morning, I wrote, “If a thumb-sized Winston Churchill on a spring bursts from Trump’s forehead tonight and bellows ‘Buy War Bonds!’ at the audience, his base will nod sagely to themselves and say it’s all part of The Plan.”
Would that it were so.
Instead, what happened was tantamount to a neo-fascist Proud Boy on a spring bursting from Trump’s forehead, tipping a wink at the camera and saying, “That’s our guy!” As the pundits spend the day playing their favorite Trump-era parlor game — “What did you think the worst part was, Snuffie?” — the president’s pointed refusal to condemn white supremacists and militia groups, while giving what sounded like a call to arms to one of them, will stand out in stark relief. Part of The Plan, indeed.
“No one alive has ever seen a presidential debate like Tuesday night’s unseemly shout fest between President Trump and former vice president Joe Biden,” writes Dan Balz for The Washington Post, adding that the “90 minutes of invective, interruptions and personal insults … was an insult to the public as well, and a sad example of the state of American democracy five weeks before the election.”
Understatement, thy name is Balz. Last night’s debate was no mere one-off, though I will be astonished if either campaign lets their guy anywhere near another debate stage before November. The debate was a giant mirror in the middle of the road, placed just so to make looking unavoidable, and the view was utterly obscene. Trump outdid even his own worst performances by a few orders of magnitude. Want to know what he will be like if he is re-elected? He will be like that. Maximum Trump.
Chris Wallace followed the well-trodden path of every Republican officeholder and every media personality who has let Trump get away with so much for so long, only to get bulldozed and humiliated for their obsequious, self-interested trouble. The last time I saw a TV person get worked like that, ironically enough, was in 1988, when a white supremacist smashed Geraldo Rivera in the face with a chair on the set of his own show.
Rivera, to his credit, went toe-to-toe with the chair-chucking fascist and came away with a broken nose and his honor intact. Chris Wallace only sat there last night, trembling like a rabbit, and did nothing. There will be a great deal of hindsight poured into what could have been done better last night, if indeed anything could have been done about Trump at all, but that debate will be a smoking crater in Wallace’s resume for all time.
As for Joe Biden, well, I defy any critic of his performance last night to get through any simple recitation in public, on camera and on stage under the hot lights, with someone like Trump standing a few feet away interrupting every other sentence with frantic bellowed lies. No one should be expected to function under such conditions.
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