'That is a damning non-answer'
Vance and Walz may not have moved the needle, but the Harris campaign got what it needed
Hello! There are 34 days till election day.
Tim finds his feet
Tim Walz was unmistakably nervous at the outset of last night’s debate with JD Vance, stumbling over his words as his voice quavered during an answer on the fast-escalating conflict in the Middle East.
It made an uncomfortable contrast with Vance, whose first answer was a masterclass in diversion, using a straight-up question about whether Israel should strike Iran unilaterally as a launching pad to wax resentful about the offshoring of American manufacturing and energy production.
He did the same when talking about Hurricane Helene, attempting to move an awkward discussion of climate change away from Donald Trump’s repeated crass statements about rising sea levels expanding the beachfront property market.
Where Walz really managed to stick the knife in, however, was on abortion:
(Source: C-SPAN)
He also managed to nail Vance and Trump to the wall on the future of democracy, harking back to the dark events of January 6th and the threat to Mike Pence’s life. (Remember: Vance has said that had he been in Pence’s position that day, he would have carried out Trump’s plan to return the electoral vote certification to the states, which has been widely deemed illegal.)
Here’s the crucial moment where Walz managed to extract from Vance what he aptly framed as “a damning non-answer”:
(Source: @acyn, a crucial follow for election clips)
To put it bluntly, this debate will make nothing like the impact of the last one, which seems to have severely damaged Donald Trump’s already fragile ego (more below).
Judging by the various snap polls and mini-panels of floating voters that the networks rolled out after the Vance-Walz face-off, there is little to suggest the race has changed as a result. CNN put out the following graphic, and if its anything to go by, it may be time for us to move on.
Orange alert
There is no avoiding it: Donald Trump is not well. I wrote about the Trump Sanity Question last week, and the importance of not sanewashing him is now paramount – not just because the election is only a month away, but because he seems to have gone into a sharp decline.
First is his doomy outlook, which appears to be darkening fast. Trump’s rhetoric about migrants has always been grim, but the imagery he’s using has turned even more violent lately, with references to foreigners slipping into people’s kitchens and slitting their throats. Yesterday he described Kamala Harris as morally culpable for murder, and he continues to claim the country is on the verge of a bloodbath – this as Vance et al demand the Democrats tone down their rhetoric about the threat Trump poses to democracy.
Second is his physicality. Trump has looked strange since well before he first ran for president, but in the weeks since the debate, something has changed. He’s spray-tanned himself beyond his usual orange juice shade into salted caramel territory, and where he used to thrash around energetically in front of a crowd, he now appears increasingly hunched, gripping the lectern ever harder and slouching rather than bouncing off the stage.
(Clip from Aaron Rupar, another essential follow)
And once again, the processing gap between his thoughts and his speech seems to be opening ever wider, his already meandering remarks badly marred by slurring, odd word substitutions and run-on sentences.
Take into account Trump’s warped relationship to reality and truth and the overall picture is of a person in the process of breaking down.
Others might try and fight this impression by getting a grip, but Trump instead is using the time between his increasingly exhausted rallies to lash out via social media, a flashback to the bad old days of the 2020 campaign when the Covid-enforced cloistering of political life cut him off from his fans’ adulation.
Here he is ranting on Truth Social about Harris’s proposal for another TV debate:
The delusions here are obvious. He is not “leading big in the polls”. He did not “beat her” at the last debate. As above, there are no indications Walz “lost so badly” last night. And it is not “too far down the line” for him to face off with her again.
My own assumption about Trump’s psychology has long been that to him, insisting on untruths can in fact make them true. In new age vocabulary, he is trying to manifest; in psychological terms, it is a particularly drastic method of resolving cognitive dissonance – not just denial or self-deception, but the crude construction of an alternative mental reality.
The most meaningful gap that’s opening up seems to be the gulf between Trump and his audience. His rallies used to be raucous; they are now quiet as an underfunded library, his fans bored to sleep and given to trickling out long before he finishes talking. The result is he has longer to rant, to ramble, to try and enforce his own unreality on whoever is listening in hopes they’ll cheer him on.
While an alarming proportion of the electorate is still going to vote for him, Trump is increasingly struggling to keep his grip on reality, and the quieter his crowds get, the harder it will become to ignore.
♂️ Further reading
Of all the themes coursing through right-wing politics, one of the strongest is manhood. What is a man’s job in the economy, the culture, the family? Where does his authority over his wife and children begin and end? What is masculinity for?
Over at The Conversation, Colorado State University Professor Karrin Vasby Anderson frames last night’s debate as “America’s dad vs. the manosphere”:
Vance was careful to defer to his white male opponent while doubling down on criticism of immigrants and the Black woman running for president.
It’s a subtle strategy, but one that could be potentially effective with swing voters who have responded positively to Walz’s “Big Dad Energy” but who, consciously or unconsciously, are inclined to be skeptical about voting for a Black woman candidate.