“Do you want to grab a beverage before the debate?” My wife asked while we were loafing around the house in the late afternoon, restlessly waiting for 9 p.m. and the first—and possibly last—debate between former-President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris.
“I could use a beer,” I said while dropping our pug Buster’s dry food into his metal bowl. Hearing the food clank against the dish, Buster came darting into the kitchen, burying his flat nose into the bowl.
After feeding our dog, we hopped in the car and headed to the bar and waited there, instead of stewing in the house, glued to our phones and the national news.
There is no way to overstate the importance of this presidential election in November. Unique to modern times, this is not an election about ideological differences, rather it is an election about democracy and basic human decency.
Trump is not mixing his messages. He has made it quite clear: He intends to become an autocrat who will exact vengeance on his perceived enemies and political opponents. You might have to go back to Andrew Jackson to find a person so sociopathically unhinged in a political position of power in this country.
But here we are. And while a part of me knew that the debate was unlikely to move the needle much in either direction—how can anyone, at this point, still be waffling on which candidate to support?—I was still nervous that Harris would shrink in front of the bully and allow him to derail her campaign.
At the bar, the beers were cold and going down too easy.
Eventually, my wife and I went home and settled onto the couch in our living room with Buster to watch the chips fall where they would.
Hosted by ABC’s David Muir and Linsay Davis, the debate started with one of Harris’ most vulnerable topics: the economy. And the vice president seemed a little jittery, and Trump was his usually bombastic, blustering self. Harris was short on details with her economic plan, and it seemed like things could easily go sideways.
But then Trump started spitting his typical lies and vitriol, and it appeared that Harris was baiting him, poking at the small man’s fragile ego—talking about his “crowd sizes” and describing him as “a disgrace”—and the small man kept taking the bait. The more angry that Trump became, the more audacious his lies grew.
On the topic of abortion, Trump started lying about incidences in states where abortions are being performed at nine months of pregnancy…
No, wait! According to Trump, abortions, or “executions,” are being performed “after birth” in these liberal bastions. I’m not sure if Trump realized it, but there is a term for an abortion performed after birth. It’s called murder, and as far as I know, murder is not legal in any of the 50 states.
But I digress.
Trump then told the world audience a racist whopper about Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, who were eating people’s domestic pets, their dogs and cats. Buster took notice of this one, perhaps the only living creature who believed Trump’s tall tale. But Buster has no interest in becoming a pug burger and will now likely support the former president moving forward.
Despite Muir correcting Trump and telling him that officials in Springfield have said that they have received no information confirming these outrageous stories, Trump made sure to not let the truth get in the way of a good yarn and doubled down anyway.
By the end of the debate, Harris had clearly rented space in Trump’s head as the former president refused to look at her, sitting behind his podium, red-faced and seething, like a 14-year-old boy being berated by his teacher.
Even the conservative media had a tough time spinning this as a Trump win, so they borrowed a page from Trump’s own playbook and declared the debate rigged by ABC and Muir and Davis, as opposed to admitting that Trump flat out lost.
I understand that last night probably didn’t change the minds of many voters—except Buster, who can’t vote because he is a pug—and Trump’s mendacious antics are the meat on which his base feeds. But unless you were deliberately wearing blinders, it was abundantly clear which candidate had composure and a presidential demeanor, and which one behaved like a petulant child.
Can this country really allow someone this thin-skinned and ridiculous back in the Oval Office? Maybe we should all listen to Taylor Swift.
