POLITICS

Debate 2020: A Cry For Help (From Washington)

Trump’s “debate” behavior and conveniently timed COVID-19 diagnosis tell us all we need to know about what’s coming down the pipeline next.

Think of the world right now if Hillary Clinton had won the presidency in 2016. The coronavirus would have been another overblown media sensation with a few thousand — hell, maybe a hundred thousand cases.

The right wing would be in its favorite position: bullied, cowed, and impotently shouting nonsensical directions from the back seat of US politics.

Hillary Clinton’s bureaucrats would have orchestrated international cooperation to contain a virus the public would have become aware of in December 2019, and Fox News would be loudly lamenting a failed US government effort to contain the virus that resulted in a comparatively small number of cases worldwide.

Hillary could have flubbed the virus response, but it never would have gotten this bad even so.

How do we know?

Well, it’s because she trusts people who do their jobs well and likes funding things like infectious disease scientists who stay in China and watch for signs of novel coronaviruses all the time.

But she isn’t president, and things have gone much worse for the rest of us.

The “debate” between Biden and Trump was immediately scorched in the press — the president acted like an entitled douchebag and Biden seemed shocked by his wanton behavior for the first part of the event. It took him some time to really wake up to the situation and begin landing punches of his own, some of which rattled the president so badly that he called upon a small group of idiot white supremacist losers to “stand by” and later suggested that illegal poll-watching would be a lovely idea.

“That was a hot mess, inside a dumpster fire, inside a train wreck,”

Jake Tapper, CNN

We’ve seen these calls for action from Trump before, and of course it is possible that he has falsely claimed to have COVID-19 to escape additional debates against Biden and mainly against his abysmal track record of astoundingly poor judgment and a tendency to immediately fail at absolutely every single part of the job of being president.

However, the important part is that it was not in a moment of strength that Trump called upon his loser racist moron friends to help. It was at a moment of supreme weakness.

Biden’s dismissal of him as a “clown” on TV seemed to deflate the president, and Wallace’s willingness to ask a few honest questions pushed the already-reeling Trump off the cliff.

It isn’t really remarkable that people ask the American president to denounce white supremacy. Hell, it’s still a white supremacist nation by and large, and many white supremacists even have gone so far as to condemn the movement on TV. Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan were both notorious racists, but they didn’t say things that tied them to racist movements in public and therefore aren’t really remembered for this exasperating and foolish character flaw.

At the end of the day, the direction the country is headed didn’t change because of Donald Trump. He slowed down the changes a bit, but he couldn’t stop progress. Not that he even really ever came up with a plan for that.

Trump’s actions were stupid throughout his presidency, which it is now safe to assume will end very soon.

Tuesday’s defeat for him was more than he could stand.

His disastrous interview with Jonathan Swan was a direct prelude to his demented and interminable ranting at Biden and at Wallace.

It was as if someone had lacerated a bag full of gas on stage. People weren’t shocked at the smell or at the sound, but rather at the sheer volume and duration of the expulsion of vile garbage that ensued. A geyser of mucus erupted onstage, and not even the American public watching at home escaped the event without being covered in sputum.

The only surprising thing about any of this is that Trump withstood the pressure of COVID-19 and his famous inadequacy in the face of it as long as he did.

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Thomas Dylan Daniel is an existential philosopher, professional ethicist, author, and biophysicist. Connect via his website or Facebook, or have a look at his books.