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.