MARK PENN GOES MASK OFF AS A GOP DISINFORMATIONIST, BUT HE'LL STILL GET TO SCOLD DEMOCRATS IN THE NEW YORK TIMES

Kamala Harris wiped the floor with Donald Trump in Tuesday night's debate, so the GOP and its propaganda wing are now insisting that there was A Conspiracy So Vast to throw the debate to Harris. The Murdoch media has signed on to this effort by giving Mark Penn and his fellow Fox News Democrat Andrew Stein a spot on the Wall Street Journal editorial page, where they argue that ABC cheated Trump:

[Harris] enlisted every charge ever leveled against Mr. Trump, regardless of the truth. That included, to name a few, the false claims that he favors a national abortion ban and opposes in vitro fertilization, that he called neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, Va., “very fine people,” and that he threatened a “bloodbath” if he loses the election.

Each is untrue: Mr. Trump has made clear he opposes a national abortion ban. He favors IVF and has even said the government should pay for it. He condemned the Charlottesville neo-Nazis. And he predicted a financial “bloodbath” for the auto industry if he loses and the Biden-Harris electric-vehicle mandates progress.

Had the moderators turned to Ms. Harris after these lies and said, “That has been debunked,” we might be having a totally different conversation about the debate, given how she tends to react when challenged.

The moderators fact-checked Trump on outrageous assertions that are unambiguously false: No state allows a born-alive infant to be murdered. Authorities in Springfield, Ohio, have said that no one is eating pets in their community. By contrast, the supposed debunking of the charge that Trump said there were "very fine people on both sides" in Charlottesville has itself been debunked. The "bloodbath" remark was ambiguous -- Trump was talking about the economy, but then he said, "Now, if I don’t get elected, it’s going to be a bloodbath, for the whole — that’s going to be the least of it. It’s going to be a bloodbath for the country. That’ll be the least of it," which at least suggests that he anticipates a society-wide apocalypse if he loses the election. And when there's a conflict between Trump's current positions and past statements -- or statements found in the Project 2025 manifesto, which is largely written by Trump advisers -- what are the undisputed facts about Trump's positions?

Beyond that, Penn and Stein's swipe at Harris -- "given how she tends to react when challenged" -- is absurd. How does she react when challenged? Based on the events of Tuesday night, when she was challenged relentlessly by Trump, she reacts with poise, precision, eloquence, and a command of the facts. I'm sure she would have handled an ABC fact-check or two deftly and effectively. (I guess it would be unfair to expect Trump to maintain poise when being questioned on accuracy.)

What's more, Penn and Stein are gaslighting us. Harris didn't out-debate Trump because he was fact-checked. She out-debated him because she showed him for what he is, a vain, angry man with extreme ideas. There wasn't a fact check involved when Trump had a meltdown over Harris's (accurate) assertion that attendees get bored at his rallies and leave early. And Trump's widely mocked slander of Haitian immigrants in Ohio -- "They're eating the dogs" -- occurred before ABC's fact check.

Penn went further on the podcast of John Solomon, a formerly respectable journalist now best known for peddling Russia-friendly falsehoods about the Biden family and Ukraine in collaboration with Rudy Giuliani. Here's what Penn said to Solomon about how ABC handled the debate:

"I actually think they should do a full internal investigation, hire an outside law firm. I don't know how much of this was planned in advance," Penn told the "John Solomon Reports" podcast.

"I don't know what they told the Harris campaign. I think the day after, suspicion here is really quite high, and I think a review of all their internal texts and emails really should be done by an independent party to find out to what extent they were planning on, in effect, you know, fact-checking just one candidate and in effect, rigging the outcome of this debate. I think the situation demands nothing less than that," he added.

(Emphasis added.)

In the Journal op-ed, Penn merely accuses ABC of pro-Harris bias. Here, in a just-asking-questions way, Penn is suggesting that ABC might have colluded with the Harris campaign to rig the debate, even though Harris's triumph didn't depend in any way on ABC's fact checks.

There was no such collusion and Penn knows it, but he's being a good disinformationist in an attempt to bring down the party he hates, a party that exiled him years ago, a party whose nominee he and his wife wanted to defeat with their No Labels project this year.

And yet I'm certain that we'll see Mark Penn on the op-ed page of The New York Times next month, or two years from now, or four years from now, and he'll be scolding Democrats as he always does for failing to move far enough right for his tastes. His bio will still include some version of "Mark Penn was a pollster and an adviser to President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton from 1995 to 2008," and no acknowledgment of his time advising Donald Trump on impeachment or his role in the attempt to ratfuck the 2024 presidential election to prevent a Democratic victory. Penn is anti-Democratic hack, but that fact will never be acknowledged at the Times.

TRUMP IS NOT REALLY THE LEADER OF HIS OWN DISINFORMATION CULT

In Tuesday's night's debate, after Kamala Harris said that Donald Trump had promised to "weaponize the Department of Justice against his political enemies," Trump replied,

This is the one that weaponized. Not me. She weaponized. I probably took a bullet to the head because of the things that they say about me.

But as Isaac Arnsdorf notes today in The Washington Post, Trump wasn't an early adopter of the false and slanderous argument that his shooting was the fault of his politcal enemies.

On the first night after Donald Trump was injured in an assassination attempt in Butler, Pa., some supporters and allies, including campaign staff, immediately began blaming President Joe Biden and Democrats before any information was available about the shooter or his possible motive. Trump himself didn’t go there. In his first public statements after the July 13 shooting, Trump thanked law enforcement, offered condolences to the rallygoers killed and wounded, and called for unity.

By early August, Trump was blaming Democrats:

Trump himself made that claim during his speech in Atlanta on [August 3]: “Remember the words they use, ‘they are a threat to democracy,’” he said. “They’ve been saying that about me for seven years. I think I got shot because of that, OK.”

But J.D. Vance -- who hadn't yet been officially named Trump's running mate -- was blaming Democrats within hours of the shooting:

Today is not just some isolated incident.

The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs.

That rhetoric led directly to President Trump's attempted assassination.

— JD Vance (@JDVance) July 14, 2024

This message spread first among extremely online right-wing influencers, and only then did Trump pick up on it. The same appears to be true of the cat-eating blood libel against Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, as Public Notice's Liz Dye notes:

According to the Springfield News-Sun, the racist meme started with a post to a Facebook group for residents of the Ohio town. The poster claimed that a neighbor’s daughter’s friend had discovered her cat butchered near a home lived in by Haitians, and further that the poster had “been told” that pet dogs as well as wild geese and ducks had been killed as well....

But local police never received any reports of pets being killed....

Charlie Kirk, Kremlin-funded Benny Johnson, and even Elon Musk all tweeted about it on Monday. But things really got out of hand when Trump’s vice presidential candidate JD Vance, the junior senator from Ohio, joined the fray.

“Months ago, I raised the issue of Haitian illegal immigrants draining social services and generally causing chaos all over Springfield, Ohio,” he tweeted on Monday, shamelessly trying to blame Vice President Harris for the nonexistent problem. “Reports now show that people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn't be in this country. Where is our border czar?”

All day Monday and Tuesday, as Trump “prepped” for the debate, the weirdos who populate his social media feed vomited out meme after meme of Trump protecting cats and ducks — most of them clearly generated using Elon Musk’s AI, known as Grok.

Only then did Trump pick up on the story.

Most people who aren't Trump supporters see the Republican Party as a cult of Trump. They cite evidence such as this recent poll, which tells us that Democrats trust a wide range of news sources for accurate election information, but Republicans seem to trust only Trump:

But Trump isn't the textbook cult leader who is the sole source of information for his followers. As we see from the examples above, Trump isn't even the sole source of his own pronouncements. By the time he makes some of his pronouncements, his followers have already been primed to believe them by online shitposters, podcasters, and right-wing cable channels such as Fox News and Newsmax.

The poll question cited above is poorly constructed. It doesn't break out Fox News or Elon Musk's X as separate choices. It doesn't mention podcasts -- if there'd been a "Podcasters such as Charlie Kirk, Ben Shapiro, and Candace Owens" option, I'm sure it would have scored very high among Republicans. "Donald Trump and his campaign" is Republicans' #1 choice because it's the only choice that, in the view of Republicans, isn't fatally poisoned by liberalism.

Republicans don't trust Trump on everything. Ask them how they feel about the vaccines whose development he used to tout as one of his great accomplishments until he began to be booed at rallies for boasting about them. Remember how supporters forced him to flip-flop on Florida's upcoming abortion referendum. That's now how personality cults work.

A year ago, I wrote this about the idea that the GOP is a Trump cult:

I'm reminded of our discovery, sometime during the post-9/11 era, that terrorism was being inspired not directly by charismatic leaders of Al-Qaeda or ISIS, but more immediately by lesser-known online influencers. The behavior of the followers was cult-like, but it seemed like cultural worship of certain ideas (and violent tactics) rather than worship of Osama bin Laden or Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. That, in a somewhat less violent form, is what we've had on the American right for years, even if it looks like a personality cult now.

The GOP cult is a disinformation cult -- followers want to believe any lie that reinforces their belief that the people they hate are evil -- but the lies come from multiple sources. In that post a year ago, I provided a partial list: "Steve Bannon and Christopher Rufo and Jack Posobiec and Marjorie Taylor Greene and Candace Owens and Elon Musk and Andrew Tate and Moms for Liberty and dozens of other people who aren't Trump." Let's add Elon Musk and J.D. Vance and Benny Johnson and Donald Trump Jr. and Chaya Raichik and Catturd and whoever runs End Wokeness, a superspreader of the cat story. Who's radicalizing your Trumpist neighbors? The people I've named are as much at fault as Donald Trump -- if not more so. And they'll be doing this long after Trump is gone, unless the GOP has suffered a series of defeats so bruising that it cuts the disinformationists loose.

HOW THE RIGHT-WING MEDIASPHERE -- AND TRUMP'S FRAGILE EGO -- SET HIM UP FOR FAILURE LAST NIGHT

Nearly everyone who watched the debate last night concedes that Kamala Harris won, and won big, including Republicans.

My phone and my X mentions are being flooded by Trump supporters complaining about the debate.

I think they know he's losing. #Debate2024

— Frank Luntz (@FrankLuntz) September 11, 2024

Some of the commentators who concede that Harris won imply that she manipulated Trump into debating badly. This is from a Wall Street Journal editorial:

She won the debate because she came in with a strategy to taunt and goad Mr. Trump into diving down rabbit holes of personal grievance and vanity that left her policies and history largely untouched. He always takes the bait, and Ms. Harris set the trap so he spent much of the debate talking about the past, or about Joe Biden, or about immigrants eating pets, but not how he’d improve the lives of Americans in the next four years.

This suggests that there's another Trump in there somewhere who is wise and statesmanlike. I don't think so. I agree with Dan Froomkin:

Donald Trump did not “have a bad debate.“ He was exposed for who he is.

— Dan Froomkin (PressWatchers.org) (@froomkin) September 11, 2024

There is no competent Trump. There is no statesmanlike Trump. The person we saw last night is the person who will be president if Trump wins, a person who spends his life in "rabbit holes of personal grievance and vanity."

Trump has always been cultural conservative -- a racist, a fan of "law and order," an admirer of strongmen and authoritarians -- but years of binge-watching Fox News have made his opinions and prejudices worse. Now he has a set of opinions -- on renewable energy vs. fossil fuels, on immigration, and so on -- that are made up of talking points from the right-wing informationsphere. When he says that windmill noise causes cancer, he's repeating an idea spread by pseudo-scientists funded by the fossil fuel industry.

But that's how his mind works -- his ego is so fragile that he can't bear to be wrong, so he clings desperately to any assertion that reinforces his notion that he's right. Windmills kill birds! Solar energy is useless when it's cloudy! Of course, the right-wing infosphere is a machine designed to reassure all of its consumers that their prejudices and resentments are right.

But a serious problem for Trump is that the right-wing infosphere is becoming even more divorced from reality than it was in the recent past. I'll give you an example, but first, some background.

I've been watching the spread of right-wing messaging for a couple of decades now. I've noticed that the right's messages aren't all spread in the same way or in the same forums. Some messages are really far-fetched and would be perceived as preposterous if they spread to the mainstream: school shootings are faked, the government controls the weather from a facility in Alaska, that sort of thing. Fox News and the Wall Street Journal editorial page have avoided endorsing these ideas. They're meant to bind voters to the GOP, but only the most gullible ones.

But in recent years, as Fox News has begun losing its primacy on the right while the Internet has increasingly been the main source for what rank-and-file right-wingers believe, fringe ideas have become more mainstream: Barack Obama birtherism, the allegedly stolen election in 2020, QAnon's notion of a vast elitist pedophile ring that somehow excludes all Republicans.

And now we have the cats.

When even J.D. Vance was spreading scurrilous stories about Haitian immigrants eating cats in Springfield, Ohio, I was surprised -- not because right-wingers are spreading hateful and dangerous blood libels about immigrants (that happens all the time), but because Republicans weren't confining the spread of this preposterous and easily disproved story to the fringier parts of their infosphere. They were going mainstream with this.

But of course they were. In 2024, it's hard to restrict a story like this to the fringe. Naturally, Elon Musk promoted it, as did many online influencers and Trumpist members of Congress.

Trump hates immigrants, so of course he seized on this story and talked about in the debate. Trump's confirmation bias is tied to his delicate ego, which always needs to say, See? I was right. A few years ago, he might not have even noticed this story. But the tiers in the right-wing mediasphere have collapsed, so the confirming messages Trump is exposed to are stupider. And he believes them.

That wasn't the only example of Trump falling for conspiracy theories that might not have reached him a few years ago. Remember this from last night?

People don't go to her rallies. There's no reason to go. And the people that do go, she's busing them in and paying them to be there. And then showing them in a different light. So, she can't talk about that.

Harris had needled Trump on the boredom some of his fans feel at his rallies, and he rose to the bait -- but he added the conspiracy theory that her crowds are Astroturfed. What's more, when he said, "And then showing them in a different light," he might have been alluding (in a garbled way) to rumors that the crowds in Harris clips were generated by AI. He has a desperate need to be the most popular politician, so he'll believe anything that confirms that belief.

Trump simply can't take in information that challenges his beliefs. His ego can't handle it. The right-wing infosphere flatters Trump the way dictators flatter Trump: by telling him what he wants to hear. That's the person Kamala Harris showed us last night, and that's why we can't allow him to win the presidency again.

THAT TIMES STORY ABOUT TRUMP'S INCOHERENCE: I QUESTION THE TIMING

After a great deal of criticism, including critiques from elsewhere in the elite mainstream media (The Atlantic, The New Republic), we finally have a story in The New York Times about Donald Trump's age and rhetorical semi-coherence. It was written by a top Times journalist, Peter Baker, and it's a reasonably good piece, starting with the headline ("As Debate Looms, Trump Is Now the One Facing Questions About Age and Capacity"). It ticks through most of the recent Trump babelogues that have made commentators question his mental health: the discussion of child care ("Mr. Trump wandered through a thicket of unfinished sentences, non sequitur clauses and confusing logic that tied the answer to tariffs on imports," Baker writes), the electrocution/shark rant, the scurrilous claim that schools are forcing gender surgery on students ("Sometimes he makes false claims that are so far-fetched, they make him appear detached from reality"), and others. We're reminded of previous moments when Trump lost his grip on reality:

He has mixed up Nikki Haley and Nancy Pelosi, declared more than once that he beat Barack Obama instead of Hillary Clinton and while arguing that he is mentally fit gave the wrong name for his former doctor.

Many observers are hoping that this is just the beginning -- that the Times and the rest of the press will focus on Trump's age and mental capacity as obsessively as they focused on Joe Biden's.

I'm skeptical. I think the point of this article was to quiet critics, after which the Times will be able to tell those critics, "But we covered that already."

I also think this appears at the best possible moment for Trump -- right before the debate, when he benefits from lowered expectations. The Times could have published a story like this at any time over the past several months. Publishing it now gives Trump a low bar to clear tonight. Since he's probably well rehearsed and since the debate format discourages him from rambling and meandering, he probably will clear that bar. Headline tomorrow: Trump wins debate, or at least Trump stands firm.

I don't want to accuse the Times of choosing this moment to run a story about Trump's babbling for precisely this reason, but I do believe the paper has a vendetta against both Kamala Harris and Joe Biden for refusing to submit to a Times interview. So maybe that really is why the Times is addressing this issue now, for the first and, I suspect, last time.

BOTH SIDES DON'T DO IT, BUT THE MEDIA NEVER NOTICES

The Washington Post has just published a story by Tim Craig about Butler County, Pennsylvania, where a gunman tried to assassinate Donald Trump a couple of months ago. Here's the headline:

The angry, divisive fallout of the Trump shooting in Butler County

The assassination attempt has pitted Democrats and Republicans against each other in a way that one historian calls ‘outright frightening.'

Did you catch that? The shooting "has pitted Democrats and Republicans against each other." In the story, Craig writes that it's "the moment that split this Pennsylvania community in two ... as both sides dig in and try to ensure that their candidate wins enough votes here to capture a key battleground state."

All this suggests that the ugliness in Butler County is evenly distributed. It isn't.

Here's every ugly incident Craig recounts:

Heidi Marie Priest, a Democrat and local real estate agent ... organized the “Butler County Women for Harris” Facebook group....

The group quickly became a sort of therapy for local Harris supporters who said they had been too fearful to express their political beliefs. On a recent afternoon, about 80 people gathered at a small park, sat in a circle and shared why they are supporting Harris....

They had tried not to draw attention to themselves, but a heckler still spotted the group and yelled, “Trump 2024!” ...

Priest ... said she has received unnerving messages at her Realtor’s office since launching the Facebook group.

“How are you this blind?” one of the callers said in a voicemail. “You are as confused as Joe Biden. You are in the wrong state. You think you are home? Nah, you are a long way from home.”

Another member of the women’s group said she believes someone threw a brick at her car after she placed a Harris bumper sticker on it.

“I put it on Monday, and on Tuesday I walked out to my car and there is a brick on my windshield,” said Rhonda, 65, who asked to be referred only by her first name, out of fear for her safety....

When a Washington Post reporter pulled into the driveway of a home with a “Biden-Harris” sign on the lawn, a passing motorist screamed an expletive aimed at the president....

Sue Legacy, the homeowner with the Biden sign, said she is used to hearing motorists hurl expletives.

“The last election was the same thing,” Legacy, 61, said. “Tensions are volatile.”

Within two hours of the shooting, John Placek began displaying a digital billboard blaming Democrats for the assassination attempt. The sign shows Trump gripping an American flag along with a target over his face. Another billboard asks, “WILL THEY TRY TO ASSASSINATE PRESIDENT TRUMP AGAIN?” A third shows Harris with red horns and states “DEMOCRATS KILL BABIES AND DREAMS.” ...

Some Butler residents are getting similar messages in their mailboxes.

State Rep. Aaron Bernstine (R) sent a mailer to his constituents accusing the media and Biden administration of “all but pulling the trigger” on July 13....

Before Trump’s rally, [Democratic county commissioner Kevin] Boozel had been pressing Republican commissioner Leslie Osche and Butler’s sheriff to keep detailed records of how much the county was spending on Trump’s visit. Osche, who attended Trump’s rally, believed a formal contract was not needed, contending that security considerations should not be dictated by cost concerns.

According to phone messages released by Boozel, he texted Osche on the night of the shooting to check in on her and tell her the White House was offering assistance.

“How freakin dare you. We were right behind the President. You who wanted a contract. Our people did well. You will burn in hell. We don’t need their help. I will fully expose you. I hope you can’t sleep,” Osche wrote.

“So much for your professionalism,” Boozel replied.

“You don’t deserve professionalism,” Osche wrote back.

Is it accurate to say, "The assassination attempt has pitted Democrats and Republicans against each other"? It seems more accurate to say that Republicans are pitted against Democrats in Butler County.

The press never seems to see this. Craig has done a good job of reporting the story -- but he stuffs it into the same both-sides-do-it box that's used for every other story about politcal "polarization."

The truth is always the same: partisans on one side, partisans who are also angry intimidators on the other side. But it's never reported that way.

IN ADDITION TO "SANEWASHING," CAN WE TALK ABOUT "REALITY-WASHING"?

Donald Trump ranted and raved at a news conference on Friday, and didn't take a single question from reporters. After the news conference was over, Jamelle Bouie of The New York Times read a portion of Trump's remarks in a TikTok video:

@jamellebouie

yes i’m wearing a kikkoman baseball cap

♬ original sound - b-boy bouiebaisse

Here's part of what Bouie read, from a transcript of Trump's remarks:

Let me talk about job numbers, because as you know, they just came out. And they’re a basic disaster.

They are really bad. You had numbers that are shocking. Native-born Americans, we lost 1.3 million jobs, while foreign-born Americans were able to take all of those jobs. So foreigners coming in illegally, largely illegally into our country, took the jobs of native-born Americans.

And I’ve been telling you that’s what’s going to happen, because we have millions and millions of people pouring into our country, many from prisons and jails and mental institutions and insane asylums, traffickers, human traffickers, women traffickers, sex traffickers, which, by the way, that’s the kind of thing that people should be looking at because it’s horrible. And it’s turning out that migrant crime is far worse than any crime that we’ve ever experienced. If you look at Aurora, Colorado, they’re taking over the place. They took over buildings, and this is just the beginning.

You haven’t seen anything yet. You haven’t seen anything. It’s allowed well over 20 million people, in my opinion. Other people say, well, it’s only 13.

No, no. It’s much more than 20. I think it’s much more than 20. Our country is being invaded because of incompetent people like Kamala that doesn’t want to do one interview.

On Threads, Bouie posted a link to his TikTok video, with this description:

i have been doing a thing on tiktok where i just read a straight transcript of what trump says just to emphasize how insane he sounds.

"Insane" is the word most Trump critics would use for this. It's an increasingly common complaint that the media is engaging in "sanewashing," as Parker Molloy put it in a New Republic piece a few days ago.

Maybe the media should be questioning Trump's mental fitness. But I see a different problem: not "sanewashing," but "reality-washing."

What Trump says here is not completely divorced from reality. I'm sure his numbers came from this Fox Business story:

The new August jobs report shows employment numbers of U.S.-born workers and foreign-born workers going on two very different trajectories.

Data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, an arm of the Department of Labor, shows native-born Americans lost more than 1.3 million jobs over the last 12 months, while foreign-born workers gained more than 1.2 million jobs.

There's a reason for that: The U.S. population is full of Baby Boomers who are retiring. As The Washington Post reported in July,

The ranks of retirees are growing much faster today than the number of new workers, ushering in an unprecedented graying of America that will reshape our workforce and economy.

Immigrants are helping to fill that gap -- and the BLS numbers didn't say they're exclusively undocumented immigrants, as even the Fox Business story acknowledges:

The figures do not differentiate between foreign-born workers who entered the country with authorization, i.e. Green Card holders and those with working visas, and those who entered without prior authorization.

But in Trump's telling, we're not seeing a lot of older native-born workers retiring faster while fewer young native-born citizens enter the workforce. His version is that native-born Americans are being forced out of jobs and nearly all of the replacement employees are undocumented immigrants, many of whom are criminals or severely mentally ill. Your jobs are being taken by border-crossing criminal psychopaths.

This should be a big story: Trump is making claims that are so divorced from reality that they describe an apocalypse, not actual American life. These aren't normal political lies. They're not even "truthful hyperbole ... an innocent form of exaggeration," which is how Trump's ghostwriter described his habitual truth-shading in his first book, The Art of the Deal.

Here's another masssive lie about immigrants, from Trump's rally in Wisconsin yesterday:

Trump: "If you think you have nice house, have a migrant enjoy your house, because a migrant will take it over. A migrant will take it over. It will be Venezuela on steroids." pic.twitter.com/nmh4a7MP7W

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 7, 2024

In addition to Trump's claim that there will be widespread seizures of American homes by undocumented immigrants during a Harris presidency, he also says in this clip that the undocumented population will rise to a preposterous 100 million.

And Trump repeated another recent extreme lie yesterday:

Trump: Can you imagine you're a parent and your son leaves the house and you say, Jimmy, I love you so much. Go have a good day in school and your son comes back with a brutal operation. pic.twitter.com/ChmwpavFAH

— Acyn (@Acyn) September 7, 2024

I still say Trump isn't crazy or suffering significant dementia. He's just beginning to realize that he can tell any lie, no matter how divorced from reality it is, and no one will say that his lies are categorically different from ordinary political lies. To the media, there's no difference between Trump saying schools are forcibly performing gender reassignment surgery on children and Tim Walz saying that he and his wife conceived their children using in vitro fertilization when they really used intra-uterine insemination. A lie is a lie! Nothing to see here, folks!

Maybe the press has a sense of futility about fact-checking Trump -- it's never stopped him from insisting that the 2020 election was rigged, so why bother? And fact checking clearly can't kill other Republican Big Lies -- that Democrats support abortion after birth, or that entire cities were burned to the ground during the George Floyd protests in 2020. (Many Republicans other than Trump tell these lies and get away with them.)

If we continue to let Trump lie this brazenly without making the sheer magnitude of the lies a story, we run the risk that he'll become president and indict enemies or call out troops on disfavored groups based entirely on fictional scenarios. Once that happens, the press might finally tell us that he's the worst-ever purveyor of Big Lies, but it could be too late by then.

THE (UNIMAGINABLE) DEBATE RULE THAT COULD DEFEAT TRUMP: NO TIME LIMIT ON STATEMENTS

The headline of this Washington Post story pulls no punches:

Trump rants, resurfaces sexual assault allegations for 49 unfocused minutes

The story -- written by four Post reporters, three of them women -- is equally straightforward:

Donald Trump railed against women who have accused him of sexual assault. He baselessly blamed the Biden-Harris administration for his legal difficulties. He appeared to criticize the physical appearances of some of his accusers. “She would not have been the chosen one,” he said of one, later adding that he would “not want to be” involved with another accuser....

And those were only some of the ways he veered away from topics voters have said they care most about in what his campaign billed as a “press conference” Friday.... Trump took no questions from the news media....

In a roughly 49-minute appearance that sometimes verged into a stream-of-consciousness rant that was hard to follow, Trump also reminisced about his early career as a real estate mogul and reality television star. (“I was,” he said, “a celebrity for a long time.”) He lamented his two impeachments, calling them “impeachment hoax number one, impeachment hoax number two.” And he mentioned Monica Lewinsky, the former White House intern who had an affair with President Bill Clinton, at least three times....

For much of the summer in a tight presidential contest, Trump’s advisers have urged him to hew to a more disciplined message....

They have tried for weeks to pull him out of a self-pitying stage....

You get the picture. This was bad. I didn't think Trump was incoherent, but he was obsessive, bitter, and nasty. Try watching a little, if you can bear it:



I'm reading this alongside stories about the debate prep being done by Trump and Kamala Harris. Harris, according to Gabriel Debenedetti of New York magazine, isn't looking for a knockout punch in the debate:

The debate, say Democrats close to Harris, is simply not the venue for just pumping up her partisans or trying to fulfill a liberal fantasy of so aggressively confronting Trump that his own supporters have second thoughts about voting for him. Instead, Harris’s team believes it needs to be about finding moments to educate and convert the voters on the margins. And for a candidate whose rallies feature “A NEW WAY FORWARD” signage and repeated audience chants of “we’re not going back,” that primarily means trying to keep the focus on her own vision for the future and contrasting it with Trump’s.

Her campaign's research tells her that undecided voters are more likely to be swayed by positive messages about her than negative messages about Trump:

Just last week, the Democratic research group Blueprint tested messaging and found that pro-Harris forces would be smarter to rely on ads featuring a contrast and positive lines about Harris over negative ones on Trump — voters are twice as likely to be moved by the former than the latter, which are only useful on the margins. (The absolute worst-performing ads in Blueprint’s tests were purely anti-Trump ads, which were in some cases three times less effective at moving voters than ads focusing on the contrast in the candidates’ abortion-policy proposals.)

Hey, whatever works. But if I think about the debate in a realm of pure fantasy, I can easily imagine a Trump knockout that might influence the votes of undecided and swing voters. It could happen if there were a debate rule that would never be permitted in the real world -- no news outlet would agree to it, and Trump's advisers would reject it.

The rule: no time limit on the candidates' statements.

I understand that the swing voters who are supporting Trump without being MAGA superfans or Fox News cultists are people who've accepted that Trump is an angry blowhard, but believe he's a person who can make inflation go away and intimidate other world leaders, in part because he's an angry blowhard. They have naive ideas about Trump's anger, believing it's an outward manifestation of a toughness he developed as a New York businessman. They also have a naive understanding of his business career, most of it based on The Apprentice.

So when they see "mean tweets," as his fans call them, they shrug them off. But people who know Trump's temperament only from short social media posts and 25-second video clips may never have seen Trump at great length. It's exhausting -- and he looks exhausted. Get Trump revved up and he just seems sourer and sourer. He wears himself out with his own rage. He doesn't look like the doer Apprentice watchers imagine he is. He just looks like a frustrated, ineffectual old man.

In my fantasy debate, Harris gets the first opening statement and ends it with a crisp, subtle zinger. The zinger gets under Trump's skin and he fills the rest of the 90-minute timeslot -- all of it -- with a rambling babelogue full of paranoid theories, resentful digressions, and Fox News buzzwords. He wears the audience out and wears himself out. To swing voters, it doesn't look presidential at all.

I'm sorry it can't happen. But I think it's possible that, between now and November, Democrats, liberal commentators, and social media video clippers will succeed in focusing the rest of America on what this angry, weary old man is really like. The liberal effort to highlight Trump's rambling answer to a question on child care this week was a start. We need more of that.