Trump continues to embrace foreign autocrats, and other debate observations

Kamala Harris eviscerated Trump last night

A few brief reactions to Kamala Harris’s dismantling of Donald Trump last night, and to the aftermath of the debate:

Kamala Harris was great, Donald Trump was not

You don’t need me to tell you this; you saw it. We all saw it.

Trump and Vance are as racist as ever

Hours before yesterday’s debate, The New York Times ran a characteristically terrible headline about the Trump-Vance campaign’s racist attacks on immigrants:

What’s so bad about that? Well, it wasn’t true. Four paragraphs into the piece, the Times admitted “even as he acknowledged the possibility that the rumors were false, Mr. Vance encouraged his supporters to continue spreading them.” That sure doesn’t seem like “backtracking” to me!

And sure enough, Donald Trump spent a good chunk of last night’s debate shouting lies about immigrants eating dogs and cats. Then, after the debate, Vance himself stood by the lie. This racist lie designed to divide American and stoke hatred towards immigrants and racial minorities — exactly the kind of lie that has in the past resulted in violence against marginalized communities. The Trump-Vance campaign isn’t “backtracking” from it because this is who they are. They want people to hate immigrants, they want to encourage violence. They don’t give a damn that the things they’re saying are false.

I started writing a longer piece about media coverage of this racist lie before yesterday’s debate; I’ll come back to it later this week. For now I’ll encourage you to read Paul Waldman’s assessment of what Trump and Vance are doing and why they’re doing it:

There are monsters in this story, but they aren’t the immigrants trying to build a better life for themselves and their families. They’re the neo-Nazis, the right-wing influencers, the ghoulish amen chorus online and on Fox, and most of all, Donald Trump and JD Vance. They’re seeding the ground for something truly horrifying, and no one should mistake it for anything else.

Donald Trump ❤️ Viktor Orban

Donald Trump keeps using the most high-profile moments in his campaign to reiterate his fondness for foreign autocrats, and I keep pleading with the news media to take this seriously.

Here’s Trump during last night’s debate:

TRUMP: Let me just tell you about world leaders. Viktor Orban, one of the most respected men -- they call him a strong man. He's a tough person. Smart. Prime Minister of Hungary. They said why is the whole world blowing up? Three years ago it wasn't. Why is it blowing up? He said because you need Trump back as president.

Based on the immediate reactions I saw on Twitter, that seemed to stun a lot of journalists. It shouldn’t have! Trump said very similar things during his speech at the Republican convention. It’s a consistent theme of his campaign: Trump admires foreign autocrats and will behave like them if he gets the chance. As Kamala Harris said last night:

HARRIS: It is well known that he admires dictators, wants to be a dictator on day one according to himself. It is well known that he said of Putin that he can do whatever the hell he wants and go into Ukraine. It is well known when that he said when Russia went into Ukraine it was brilliant. It is well known he exchanged love letters with Kim Jong un.

Then after Trump got his clock cleaned in the debate he retreated to his safe space at Fox News to suggest ABC should lose its broadcast license because he is embarrassed he lost:

That, of course, is exactly the kind of thing Viktor Orban has done to destroy the free press in Hungary. It also isn’t how broadcast licenses work — ABC doesn’t have a license; individual local affiliates have licenses. And they’re broadcast licenses, not news licenses. You do not “have to be licensed” to report news in America. But not knowing what he’s talking about has never stopped Trump before.

Will the news media finally start giving Trump’s clear intent to pattern his presidency on the rule of foreign autocrats? Odds are pretty good I’ll have more to say about this soon, unfortunately.

Debate moderators gave Trump more time than Harris

Trump wasn’t the only Republican whining about the ABC debate moderators. The Republican Party Line on last night’s debacle is that Trump was treated unfairly. This is hardly a surprise; that’s been the GOP party line for 50 years; they’re professional victims. It’s also nonsense, as it generally is.

What actually happened last night is that the debate moderators gave Trump five minutes more speaking time than Harris, and routinely allowed him to speak when it wasn’t his turn:

That extra speaking time didn’t help Trump, because Trump is so repellant the more he talks the worse off he is. But that’s his fault, not the fault of the moderators who gave him additional time.

Harris delivered a masterful debate performance, and Donald Trump again demonstrated he is unfit for office — but this isn’t over

The general consensus among the punditocracy seems to be that Kamala Harris’s performance last night was the best-ever against Donald Trump, and perhaps the most dominant debate performance ever, period.

I very much agree Harris was the far more impressive candidate; hers was a legitimately great performance and I have no interest in detracting from that. And Trump was so bad he managed to trip over the low bar the news media sets for him. But everyone seems to have forgotten that Hillary Clinton thoroughly dismantled Trump in the 2016 debates. Seriously, go back and watch if you don’t believe me. Clinton’s 2016 debate victories didn’t wrap up the election, and neither did Harris’s big win last night.

The reality remains that a lot of Americans like Donald Trump and the racism, sexism, cruelty, and autocracy he promises, and there’s a good chance this election will be very close. Perhaps close enough for Trump’s efforts to subvert democracy to be successful this time. So every vote matters. I know the Harris campaign won’t take victory for granted; nobody else should either. This is a time for confidence — but there is work left to be done. Not just to elect Kamala Harris, but to defeat Trump Republicans up and down the ballot, in every race from president to dog-catcher.

So now’s a great time to make sure you’re registered to vote — and to encourage friends and family to do so as well. To talk to them about the importance of voting, and the importance of voting not just for Kamala Harris but for Democratic candidates for Congress and for state and local office. To volunteer, if you have free time. To chip in financially if you can — down-ballot campaigns in particular can use all the help they can get.

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I’ve written previously that Democrats should campaign aggressively against the right-wing Supreme Court. Last night’s debate was a reminder of how Trump and the MAGA Court work hand-in-glove on everything from taking away abortion rights to prolonging the college debt crisis, as I explained today in Take Back The Court’s newsletter.